The perception of visual motion during movements of the eyes and of the head

If physical movements are to be seen veridically, it is necessary to distinguish between displacements over the retina due to self-motion and those due to object motion. When target motion is in a different direction from that of a pursuit eye movement, the perceived motion of the target is known to be shifted in direction toward the retinal path, indicating a partial failure of compensation for eye movements (Becklen, Wallach, & Nitzberg, 1984). The experiments reported here compared the perception of target motion when the head and/or eyes were moving in a direction different from that of the target. In three experiments, target motion was varied in direction, phase, and extent with respect to pursuit movements. In all cases, the compensation was less effective for head than for eye movements, although this difference was least when the extent of the tracked and target motions was the same. Compensation for pursuit eye movements was better than that reported in previous studies.

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