Martin Rolfs (SCIoI): The impact of visual actions on human vision

The impact of visual actions on human vision
More than 10,000 times every waking hour, we use rapid movements of our eyes, head and body to reorient our gaze. These visual actions allow us to see every aspect of the visual world at the highest resolution. It seems likely — in particular within SCIoI — that we can only begin to understand perception and cognition if we study their fundamental mechanisms in active observers. Yet psychology and neuroscience have long studied vision and motor control largely independently, presenting two success stories: Vision has been the work horse of perception research for more than a century and the brain circuits controlling gaze movements are now among the best understood in systems neuroscience.
It is at the intersection of these two systems, however, that we encounter the most intriguing questions. How do we not experience the brisk motion of the entire scene on the retina every time the eyes move? How does the visual system keep track of objects’ changing retinal locations across consecutive glances. And how do we routinely attribute retinal motion to our own movements rather than to motion in the world. To explain these phenomena, research and theories across disciplines have focused on how the brain uses its knowledge about ongoing movement plans to predict and compensate for undesirable side effects of visual actions. I will present a number of findings from psychophysical studies that, more often than not, give more surprising answers and that raise new questions about the tight weaving of perception and action.