Motion Extrapolation for Eye Movements Predicts Perceived Motion-Induced Position Shifts

Transmission delays in the nervous system pose challenges for the accurate localization of moving objects as the brain must rely on outdated information to determine their position in space. Acting effectively in the present requires that the brain compensates not only for the time lost in the transmission and processing of sensory information, but also for the expected time that will be spent preparing and executing motor programs. Failure to account for these delays will result in the mislocalization and mistargeting of moving objects. In the visuomotor system, where sensory and motor processes are tightly coupled, this predicts that the perceived position of an object should be related to the latency of saccadic eye movements aimed at it. Here we use the flash-grab effect, a mislocalization of briefly flashed stimuli in the direction of a reversing moving background, to induce shifts of perceived visual position in human observers (male and female). We find a linear relationship between saccade latency and perceived position shift, challenging the classic dissociation between “vision for action” and “vision for perception” for tasks of this kind and showing that oculomotor position representations are either shared with or tightly coupled to perceptual position representations. Altogether, we show that the visual system uses both the spatial and temporal characteristics of an upcoming saccade to localize visual objects for both action and perception.