Pre-saccadic suppression and compensatory cortical distortions support predictive visual remapping

Abstract

Perceptual continuity across saccades relies on the predictive remapping of receptive fields (RFs) of visual neurons, driven by corollary discharge (CD). However, how the brain achieves accurate and coherent remapping within its non-uniform visual representation remains unclear. Here, we present a generalized framework of recurrent 2D network in which neurons conjunctively tuned to retinotopic location and planned saccade direction integrate CD signals to predictively remap. We show that pre-saccadic suppression (PS) stabilizes this process by counteracting direction selectivity distortions, while recurrent connectivity preserves cell-cell RF relationship against input noise by constraining the cortical map to a low-dimensional manifold. Analyzing macaque V2 recordings, we validate saccade direction selectivity, the role of PS, and conserved RF relationships. Lastly, we show that while non-uniform representation introduces eccentricity-dependent remapping errors in the model, countervailing distortions systematically reduce them. Our study reveals how network architecture can reconcile the demands of visual acuity and perceptual continuity.