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  • Review Article
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Through the eye, slowly; Delays and localization errors in the visual system

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 3, page 191 (2002)Cite this article

Key Points

  • Afferent delays in the visual system are long and often lead to the mislocalization of objects. When our eyes or visible objects move, temporal errors in transmitting and processing neural signals can easily translate into spatial errors. This review considers three cases in which this occurs: when we pursue a moving target, when we try to localize a target that is presented just before a saccadic eye movement, and when we try to locate a moving stimulus with respect to a flashed one.

  • During smooth pursuit, an image of the moving target is always on the fovea. However, when that image reaches the level of perception, the eye is already pointing further along the anticipated target trajectory. Therefore, 'what-we-see' might not correspond to 'where-we-are-looking-at-that-instant'. Experimental data indicate that this is indeed the case. If so, our brain does not attempt to compensate for visual afferent delays.

  • The delay problem encountered in smooth pursuit is exacerbated during saccades because they are so fast. A large saccade can be performed during the time it takes for the image of a flashed object to reach the level of perception. How, then, can we localize the object? In the absence of any other visual cue, we have to rely on internal information about the trajectory and time course of the performed saccade. Experimental data show that this information (called the eye-position signal, or EPS) is available, although it is quite distorted. The distortion causes systematic mislocalizations, which affect stimuli presented not only during a saccade, but also before and after, when the eye is stable.

  • A number of illusions caused by stimulus motion are strikingly similar to perisaccadic mislocalization. The best known is the flash-lag effect, in which the perceived spatial relationship between a moving object and a stable one that is briefly flashed in the dark seems to be distorted. We argue that the cause of the illusion might be the indeterminacy of the exact time of an event (such as the flash). Recent data show that our current models of peaks of activity in visual maps are too simplistic to account for localization in the presence of change.

  • Analogous misperceptions can occur with other types of change, apart from stimulus–retinal slip. The problem can be formulated in general terms: when a variable changes (eye, body or stimulus variable), even predictably, how does the brain determine its state at the instant specified by an event? To answer this question, we have to understand how the brain encodes a changing variable (for example, position versus velocity signals), and how it reads that code (continuously or by sampling).

Abstract

Reviews on the visual system generally praise its amazing performance. Here we deal with its biggest weakness: sluggishness. Inherent delays lead to mislocalization when things move or, more generally, when things change. Errors in time translate into spatial errors when we pursue a moving object, when we try to localize a target that appears just before a gaze shift, or when we compare the position of a flashed target with the instantaneous position of a continuously moving one (or one that appears to be moving even though no change occurs in the retinal image). Studying such diverse errors might rekindle our thinking about how the brain copes with real-time changes in the world.

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Figure 1: Effect of visual delay in smooth pursuit.
Figure 2: Interconnections between oculomotor centres for saccades and smooth pursuit.
Figure 3: Layout of the double-step task.
Figure 4: Steps involved in determining the time course of the hypothetical eye-position signal.
Figure 5: Nijhawan's flash-lag set-up.
Figure 6: Flash-lag induced by rotation in a vestibular chair.

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Acknowledgements

Support was provided by grants from the National Institutes of Health. We thank E. Brenner, P. Dassonville, R. Cai and J. Park for helpful comments.

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  1. Department of Neurobiology, UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, 90095-1763, California, USA

    John Schlag & Madeleine Schlag-Rey

  2. John Schlag & Madeleine Schlag-Rey

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  2. Madeleine Schlag-Rey
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oculomotor system

 MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences

eye movements and visual attention

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spatial perception

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CLOSED LOOP

A system in which the input is made dependent on the output by feedback.

EFFERENCE COPY

A copy of a motor command that is sent back to the central nervous system to inform it of the executed movement.

SPATIAL CONSTANCY

The perceptual assumption that objects are still where they were in the world when the retinal shift of their image is caused by our own movements.

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Schlag, J., Schlag-Rey, M. Through the eye, slowly; Delays and localization errors in the visual system. Nat Rev Neurosci 3, 191 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn750

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