Visual mislocalization in moving background and saccadic eye movement conditions

Abstract

There is a possibility that visual mislocalization of targets flashed at the time of a saccadic eye movement is due almost entirely to the shift of the retinal image of the background. To clarify this matter, errors in target localization were analyzed in both saccadic eye movement and moving background conditions. In the latter condition, subject kept fixating and the visual background made a saccadic movement. In both conditions, a horizontal luminous scale was used as the background and the subject reported the position on the scale that the target appeared to occupy. Large localization errors were shown in both conditions. However, the pattern of error for the moving background condition was distinctively different from that for the saccadic eye movement condition, suggesting that the shift of the background image is not sufficient to explain the localization error in the saccadic eye movement condition. © 1995 Elsevier B.V.