Cyclopean flash-lag illusion

Possible physiological mechanisms to explain the flash-lag effect, in which subjects perceive a flashed item that is co-localized with a moving item as trailing behind the moving item, have been found within the retina of lower species, and in the motor pathways of humans. Here, we demonstrate flash-lag employing "second-order" moving and flashed stimuli, defined solely by their binocular-disparity, to circumvent any possible "early" contributions to the effect. A significant flash-lag effect was measured with cyclopean stimuli composed entirely of correlated random dot patterns. When the disparity-defined moving stimulus was replaced with a luminance-defined one, potentially engaging retinal mechanisms, the magnitude of the measured effect showed no significant change. Thus, in primates, though retinal mechanisms may contribute, flash-lag must be explained through cortical processes.

[1]  H. Barlow.  Summation and inhibition in the frog's retina , 1953, The Journal of physiology.

[2]  P. Cavanagh,et al.  Motion: the long and short of it. , 1989, Spatial vision.

[3]  P Cavanagh,et al.  Attention-based motion perception. , 1992, Science.

[4]  W. Reichardt.  Autokorrelations-Auswertung als Funktionsprinzip des Zentralnervensystems , 1957 .

[5]  Shinsuke Shimojo,et al.  Changing objects lead briefly flashed ones , 2000, Nature Neuroscience.

[6]  Stanley A. Klein,et al.  Extrapolation or attention shift? , 1995, Nature.

[7]  B. Julesz.  Foundations of Cyclopean Perception , 1971 .

[8]  O J Braddick,et al.  Low-level and high-level processes in apparent motion. , 1980, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences.

[9]  Kuno Kirschfeld,et al.  Analogous Mechanisms Compensate for Neural Delays in the Sensory and the Motor Pathways Evidence from Motor Flash-Lag , 2003, Current Biology.

[10]  Robert Patterson,et al.  Stereoscopic (cyclopean) motion sensing , 1999, Vision Research.

[11]  Y Dan,et al.  Motion-Induced Perceptual Extrapolation of Blurred Visual Targets , 2001, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[12]  Romi Nijhawan,et al.  Motion extrapolation in catching , 1994, Nature.

[13]  G Westheimer,et al.  Dynamics of spatial summation in primary visual cortex of alert monkeys. , 1999, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[14]  M. Mignard,et al.  Paths of information flow through visual cortex. , 1991, Science.

[15]  I. Murakami,et al.  Latency difference, not spatial extrapolation , 1998, Nature Neuroscience.

[16]  Michael J. Berry,et al.  Anticipation of moving stimuli by the retina , 1999, Nature.

[17]  D H Brainard,et al.  The Psychophysics Toolbox. , 1997, Spatial vision.

[18]  A. T. Smith,et al.  Stereoscopic and contrast-defined motion in human vision , 1998, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences.

[19]  Vision Research , 1961, Nature.

[20]  A. Smit,et al.  Synapse Formation between Central Neurons Requires Postsynaptic Expression of the MEN1 Tumor Suppressor Gene , 2001, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[21]  Gopathy Purushothaman,et al.  Moving ahead through differential visual latency , 1998, Nature.

[22]  G. Sperling,et al.  The functional architecture of human visual motion perception , 1995, Vision Research.

[23]  George Sperling,et al.  Attention-generated apparent motion , 1995, Nature.