Target–Distractor Competition in the Oculomotor System Is Spatiotopic

In natural scenes, multiple visual stimuli compete for selection; however, each saccade displaces the stimulus representations in retinotopicaly organized visual and oculomotor maps. In the present study, we used saccade curvature to investigate whether oculomotor competition across eye movements is represented in retinotopic or spatiotopic coordinates. Participants performed a sequence of saccades and we induced oculomotor competition by briefly presenting a task-irrelevant distractor at different times during the saccade sequence. Despite the intervening saccade, the second saccade curved away from a spatial representation of the distractor that was presented before the first saccade. Furthermore, the degree of saccade curvature increased with the salience of the distractor presented before the first saccade. The results suggest that spatiotopic representations of target-distractor competition are crucial for successful interaction with objects of interest despite the intervening eye movements. © 2014 the authors.