Saccades let the visual world move quickly across the retina, creating a strong motion sensation. But when people see things naturally, they never see motion caused by saccades. A brief decrease in visual sensitivity at the moment of saccade commencement, or so-called saccadic suppression, may be the root cause of the absence of perisaccadic motion perception.
For contrast, displacement, and motion cues, saccade suppression happens. It had been established that saccade suppression of displacements depended on the environment. The amplitude of saccade suppression was significantly reduced after executing saccades in sessions without perisaccadic stimulus. For a study, researchers sought to determine if context similarly influences saccade suppression of contrast. In order to do it, they used projection to create a ganzfeld-like environment that, depending on the experimental session, either included or did not contain any apparent contrast stimuli.
The context sensitivity of saccade suppression of displacements was effectively duplicated initially. Then, they asked participants to make multiple saccades either over a homogeneous white wall or across a background made up of a sinusoidal grating in order to investigate the context sensitivity of contrast suppression. They did not discover context sensitivity for suppression of contrast, in contrast to perisaccadic context sensitivity for displacement suppression.
Reference: jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2783634
