Coordination of goal-directed behavior depends on the brain’s ability to recover the locations of relevant objects in the world. In humans, the visual system encodes the spatial organization of sensory inputs, but neurons in early visual areas map objects according to their retinal positions, rather than where they are in the world. How the brain computes world-referenced spatial information across eye movements has been widely researched and debated. Here, we tested whether shifts of covert attention are sufficiently precise in space and time to track an object’s real-world location across eye movements. We found that observers’ attentional selectivity is remarkably precise and is barely perturbed by the execution of saccades. Inspired by recent neurophysiological discoveries, we developed an observer model that rapidly estimates the real-world locations of objects and allocates attention within this reference frame. The model recapitulates the human data and provides a parsimonious explanation for previously reported phenomena in which observers allocate attention to task-irrelevant locations across eye movements. Our findings reveal that visual attention operates in real-world coordinates, which can be computed rapidly at the earliest stages of cortical processing.

中文翻译：

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基于视觉增益场的扫视注意力分配的计算说明


目标导向行为的协调取决于大脑恢复世界上相关物体位置的能力。在人类中，视觉系统对感觉输入的空间组织进行编码，但早期视觉区域的神经元根据物体的视网膜位置来映射物体，而不是根据它们在世界上的位置。大脑如何通过眼球运动计算世界参考空间信息已经被广泛研究和争论。在这里，我们测试了隐性注意力的转移在空间和时间上是否足够精确，可以通过眼球运动来跟踪物体在现实世界中的位置。我们发现观察者的注意力选择性非常精确，并且几乎不会受到眼跳执行的干扰。受最近神经生理学发现的启发，我们开发了一种观察者模型，可以快速估计物体在现实世界中的位置，并在此参考系内分配注意力。该模型概括了人类数据，并为之前报道的现象提供了简约的解释，在这些现象中，观察者将注意力分配到眼球运动中与任务无关的位置。我们的研究结果表明，视觉注意力在现实世界坐标中运行，可以在皮质处理的最早阶段快速计算。