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Changing objects lead briefly flashed ones

Nature Neuroscience volume 3, pages 489–495 (2000)Cite this article

Abstract

Continuous, predictable events and spontaneous events may coincide in the visual environment. For a continuously moving object, the brain compensates for delays in transmission between a retinal event and neural responses in higher visual areas. Here we show that it similarly compensated for other smoothly changing features. A disk was flashed briefly during the presentation of another disk of continuously changing color, and observers compared the colors of the disks at the moment of flash. We also tested luminance, spatial frequency and pattern entropy; for all features, the continuously changing item led the flashed item in feature space. Thus the visual system's ability to compensate for delays in information about a continuously changing stimulus may extend to all features. We propose a model based on backward masking and priming to explain the phenomenon.

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Figure 1: The flashed object lags behind in color space.
Figure 2: A flashed object in luminance, spatial-frequency or pattern-entropy space perceptually trails a continuously present and smoothly changing one.
Figure 3: Attentional switching effects cannot account for the flash-lag phenomenon.
Figure 4: Color aftereffect (adaptation) cannot explain the color flash-lag effect.
Figure 5: Reducing the intensity of the flash or its duration did not enhance the flash-lag effect.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by NSF grant SBR-9710116 and a Caltech Division of Biology fellowship awarded to B.R.S. We thank Johanna Weber for reviewing our manuscript, Christian Scheier for providing the statistics software, Gabriel Kreiman for help with printing and Chris Tyler for suggestions on improving the pattern-entropy experiment.

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  1. California Institute of Technology 139-74, Pasadena, 91125, California, USA

    Bhavin R. Sheth, Romi Nijhawan & Shinsuke Shimojo

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  1. Bhavin R. Sheth
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  3. Shinsuke Shimojo
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Correspondence to Bhavin R. Sheth.

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Sheth, B., Nijhawan, R. & Shimojo, S. Changing objects lead briefly flashed ones. Nat Neurosci 3, 489–495 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/74865

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