Trans-saccadic memory as mental imagery

When we visually explore the scene in front of us, we move our eyes. And each time we move our eyes, our visual system needs to remap the contents of our visual array. Suppose that you are looking at a fixation cross and there is a triangle at the extreme right-hand side of your periphery. When you move your eyes and fixate on the triangle, the triangle is in your fovea and the fixation cross is at the extreme left-hand side of your peripheral vision. At first, the triangle showed up in the right-hand side of your visual field and then it was bang in the middle of it. But your visual system takes this triangle to be the same. So the visual system needs to somehow keep track of this triangle in a way that would assure that its identity is preserved across the radical change in which part of your visual field it shows up. This phenomenon is called trans-saccadic memory, because the visual system needs to remember from the beginning of the saccade to the end of the saccade what visual objects are where in the visual field. In this talk, I argue that trans-saccadic memory is a form of temporal mental imagery.