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Lawful kinematics link eye movements to the limits of high-speed perception
Saccadic eye movements sample the visual world, but the retinal motion they entail goes unnoticed. This study shows that lawful saccade kinematics predict motion visibility, omitting saccade-like motion while preserving sensitivity to high speed.
Saccades provide an ideal test case for the action-dependence of perception: They are the most frequent movement of the human body, occurring some 10,000 times every waking hour, and they have reliable, stereotyped kinematics 14 that impose systematic sensory consequences on the retinal surface 10, 15. Stimuli were vertically-oriented Gabor patches (1 cycle/dva, sigma of the envelope: 1/3 dva), traveling on a motion path corresponding to an arc of a circle with a radius chosen such that the maximum deviation from a straight line was exactly 15% (reached at the center of the screen, right above or below fixation). We thank Nina Hanning, Lisa M. Kroell, Matthias Nau, Oliver Steiner, and Viola Störmer for feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript, and all members of the Active Perception and Cognition laboratory for their continuous contribution to the project, including help with data collection.
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