Perceptual restoration fails to recover unconscious processing for smooth eye movements after occipital stroke

The visual pathways that guide actions do not necessarily mediate conscious perception. Patients with primary visual cortex (V1) damage lose conscious perception but often retain unconscious abilities (e.g. blindsight). Here, we asked if saccade accuracy and post-saccadic following responses (PFRs) that automatically track target motion upon saccade landing are retained when conscious perception is lost. We contrasted these behaviors in the blind and intact fields of 11 chronic V1-stroke patients, and in 8 visually intact controls. Saccade accuracy was relatively normal in all cases. Stroke patients also had normal PFR in their intact fields, but no PFR in their blind fields. Thus, V1 damage did not spare the unconscious visual processing necessary for automatic, post-saccadic smooth eye movements. Importantly, visual training that recovered motion perception in the blind field did not restore the PFR, suggesting a clear dissociation between pathways mediating perceptual restoration and automatic actions in the V1-damaged visual system.


Sample-size estimation
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Participant information is explained in "Participants" in the Material and Methods section. Visual field defects were confirmed using monocular, Humphrey automated perimetry in each cortically blind patient. Therefore, we compared and contrasted the visual field performance of cortically blind patients (both intact-and blind-fields) and corrected-to-normal vision participants.
Data for all figures has been shared on the Dryad. https://doi.org/10.6078/D1W69T