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Illusory shifts in visual direction accompany adaptation of saccadic eye movements

Nature volume 400, pages 864–866 (1999)Cite this article

Abstract

A central problem in human vision is to explain how the visual world remains stable despite the continual displacements of the retinal image produced by rapid saccadic movements of the eyes. Perceived stability has been attributed to ‘efferent-copy’ signals, representing the saccadic motor commands, that cancel the effects of saccade-related retinal displacements1,2,3,4,5,6. Here we show, by means of a perceptual illusion, that traditional cancellation theories cannot explain stability. The perceptual illusion was produced by first inducing adaptive changes in saccadic gain (ratio of saccade size to target eccentricity). Following adaptation, subjects experienced an illusory mislocalization in which widely separated targets flashed before and after saccades appeared to be in the same place. The illusion shows that the perceptual system did not takethe adaptive changes into account. Perceptual localization is based on signals representing the size of the initially-intended saccade, not the size of the saccade that is ultimately executed. Signals representing intended saccades initiate a visual comparison process used to maintain perceptual stability across saccades and to generate the oculomotor error signals that ensure saccadic accuracy.

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Figure 1: Representative traces of horizontal eye (solid line) and stimulus position (dotted line).
Figure 2: Saccadic adaptation and perceptual localization for each subject.
Figure 3: Magnitude of saccadic adaptation plotted against the size of the perceptual illusion.

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Acknowledgements

Supported by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Life Sciences Directorate, Program on Spatial Orientation. We thank J. Feldman and M. Regan for helpful comments.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, Piscataway, 08854, New Jersey, USA

    Dan O. Bahcall & Eileen Kowler

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  1. Dan O. Bahcall
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  2. Eileen Kowler
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Correspondence to Eileen Kowler.

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Bahcall, D., Kowler, E. Illusory shifts in visual direction accompany adaptation of saccadic eye movements. Nature 400, 864–866 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/23693

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