The faster you decide, the more accurate localization is possible: Position representation of "curveball illusion" in perception and eye movements

Measuring the double-drift illusion and its resets with hand trajectories

If a Gabor pattern drifts in one direction while its internal texture drifts in the orthogonal direction, its perceived position deviates further and further away from its true path. We first evaluated the illusion using manual tracking. Participants followed the Gabor with a stylus on a drawing tablet that coincided optically with the horizontal monitor surface. Their hand and the stylus were not visible during the tracking. The magnitude of the tracking illusion corresponded closely to previous perceptual and pointing measures indicating that manual tracking is a valid measure for the illusion. This allowed us to use it in a second experiment to capture the behavior of the illusion as it eventually degrades and breaks down in single trials. Specifically, the deviation of the Gabor stops accumulating at some point and either stays at a fixed offset or resets toward the veridical position. To report the perceived trajectory of the Gabor, participants drew it after the Gabor was removed from the monitor. Resets were detected and analyzed and their distribution matches neither a temporal nor a spatial limit, but rather a broad gamma distribution over time. This suggests that resets are triggered randomly, about once per 1.3 seconds, possible by extraneous distractions or eye movements.

Smooth pursuit operates over perceived not physical positions of the double-drift stimulus

The double-drift illusion produces a large deviation in perceived direction that strongly dissociates physical position from perceived position. Surprisingly, saccades do not seem to be affected by the illusion (Lisi & Cavanagh, 2015). When targeting a double-drift stimulus, the saccade system is driven by retinal rather than perceived position. Here, using paired double-drift targets, we test whether the smooth pursuit system is driven by perceived or physical position. Participants (n = 7) smoothly pursued the inferred midpoint (Steinbach, 1976) between two horizontally aligned Gabor patches that were separated by 20° and moving on parallel, oblique paths. On the first half of each trial, the Gabors’ internal textures were static while both drifted obliquely downward. On the second half of each trial, while the envelope moved obliquely upward, the internal texture drifted orthogonally to the envelope's motion, producing a large perceived deviation from the downward path even though the upward and downward trajectories always followed the same physical path but in opposite directions. We find that smooth pursuit eye movements accurately followed the nonillusory downward path of the midpoint between the two Gabors, but then followed the illusory rather than the physical trajectory on the upward return. Thus, virtual targets for smooth pursuit are derived from perceived rather than retinal coordinates.

Attention updates the perceived position of moving objects

The information used by conscious perception may differ from that which drives certain actions. A dramatic illusion caused by an object's internal texture motion has been put forward as one example. The motion causes an illusory position shift that accumulates over seconds into a large effect, but targeting of the grating for a saccade (a rapid eye movement) is not affected by this illusion. While this has been described as a dissociation between perception and action, an alternative explanation is that rather than saccade targeting having privileged access to the correct position, a shift of attention that precedes saccades resets the accumulated illusory position shift to zero. In support of this possibility, we found that the accumulation of illusory position shift can be reset by transients near the moving object, creating an impression of the object returning to near its actual position. Repetitive luminance changes of the object also resulted in reset of the accumulation, but less so when attention to the object was reduced by a concurrent digit identification task. Finally, judgments of the object's positions around the time of saccade onset reflected the veridical rather than the illusory position. These results suggest that attentional shifts, including those preceding saccades, can update the perceived position of moving objects and mediate the previously reported dissociation between conscious perception and saccades.

Attentional tracking takes place over perceived rather than veridical positions

Illusions can induce striking differences between perception and retinal input. For instance, a static Gabor with a moving internal texture appears to be shifted in the direction of its internal motion, a shift that increases dramatically when the Gabor itself is also in motion. Here, we ask whether attention operates on the perceptual or physical location of this stimulus. To do so, we generated an attentional tracking task where participants (N = 15) had to keep track of a single target among three Gabors that rotated around a common center in the periphery. During tracking, the illusion was used to make three Gabors appear either shifted away from or toward one another while maintaining the same physical separation. Because tracking performance depends in part on target to distractor spacing, if attention selects targets from perceived positions, performance should be better when the Gabors appear further apart and worse when they appear closer together. We find that tracking performance is superior with greater perceived separation, implying that attentional tracking operates over perceived rather than physical positions.

Distinct temporal developments of visual motion and position representations for multi-stream visuomotor coordination

A fundamental but controversial question in information coding of moving visual target is which of 'motion' or 'position' signal is employed in the brain for producing quick motor reactions. Prevailing theory assumed that visually guided reaching is driven always via target position representation influenced by various motion signals (e.g., target texture and surroundings). To rigorously examine this theory, we manipulated the nature of the influence of internal texture motion on the position representation of the target in reaching correction tasks. By focusing on the difference in illusory position shift of targets with the soft- and hard-edges, we succeeded in extracting the temporal development of an indirect effect only ascribed to changes in position representation. Our data revealed that the onset of indirect effect is significantly slower than the adjustment onset itself. This evidence indicates multi-stream processing in visuomotor control: fast and direct contribution of visual motion for quick action initiation, and relatively slow contribution of position representation updated by relevant motion signals for continuous action regulation. The distinctive visuomotor mechanism would be crucial in successfully interacting with time-varying environments in the real world.