In our main experiment, we searched for evidence for pre-saccadic remapping of visual space as revealed by the motion aftereffect.
Since regular photoreceptor spacing is critical for uniform sampling of visual space, the cone mosaics of the avian retina represent an elegant example of the emergence of adaptive global patterning secondary to simple local interactions between individual photoreceptors.
The work of Haxby, Ungerleider, and colleagues had identified parallel processing streams for the processing of visual space versus visual features (Haxby et al. 1991).
In fact, Hebbian mechanisms could be expected to support such a development, with neurons receiving input from both eyes, each encoding for the same region of visual space, and thus the maximal level of refinement would have been limited by the quality of retinal input or other mechanisms.
Topographic representation of visual space was suggested for the visual wulst of domestic chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus) [30] on the basis of single neuron recordings.
Our main finding that spatially nonpredictive tactile events did not lead to small spatially specific cued zones of visual space has implications for the current view of good spatial coordination of touch and vision across postures.
"More for the visual space than to create a mezzanine".
The parietal lobes are thought to be critical for representing visual space (e.g., Ungerleider and Mishkin 1982), transforming vision into action (e.g., Milner and Goodale 1996; Quiroga et al. 2006), and flexibly orienting visual attention (e.g., Posner and Petersen 1990; Colby and Goldberg 1999).
As a starting point of our design and based on extensive prior evidence, we took for granted that visual space is not extended just prior to saccadic movement, neither in the horizontal nor vertical dimension (e.g., [3], [4], [6], [11]).
