The new year started with the good news that our article titled: “Post-saccadic face processing is modulated by pre-saccadic preview: evidence from fixation-related potentials“, coauthored with Olaf Dimigen and David Melcher, has been accepted for publication in The Journal of Neuroscience.

In the article, we show that the N170, a classic electrophysiological marker of the structural encoding of faces, also occurs during a more natural viewing condition, for example when we move our eyes to look at a face that is visible in the periphery. The interesting effect that we now report is that when a preview of the face is available extrafoveally (as opposed to a peripheral visual stimulation with no structural features but similar spatial frequency content), the N170 is massively reduced (preview benefit). We interpreted the result by suggesting a mechanisms that operates across the saccade by predicting the visual consequences of the eye movement. Such a mechanism can influence category-specific neural processing at the start of a new fixation and it might be used to maintain a stable representation of the world around us.

An early release of the article should be available later this week.