sensorimotor contingency

Lawful kinematics link eye movements to the limits of high-speed perception

In this paper, we report a mysterious finding. When detecting rapid stimulus motion of a Gabor stimulus oriented orthogonal to its motion direction, it is not simply its absolute velocity that determines its visibility, but a combination of velocity and movement distance. Curiously, the specific combination that predicts velocity thresholds follows an oculomotor law, that is, the main sequence, an exponential function describing the increase of saccadic velocity with growing amplitude. My proud contributions to this paper feature the masking experiment, the modeling of saccade trajectories which ultimately revealed significant correlations between saccade metrics and velocity thresholds, and most importantly, the early vision model to predict the measured psychophysical data, without fitting and based only on the trajectory of the stimulus. Finally, I evaluated the timing of the motion stimulus using photometric measurements using the LM03 lightmeter.

Martin Rolfs, Richard Schweitzer, Eric Castet, Tamara Watson, Sven Ohl

Lawful kinematics link eye movements to the limits of high-speed perception

Coupling perception to action through incidental sensory consequences of motor behaviour

This perspective paper is dedicated to the question how an active perceptual system deals with the sensory consequences of its own actions. For instance, in the field of active vision little is known about the consequences of large-field smear induced by the rapid image shift caused by saccades. Whereas such information is thought to hinder visual processing, new evidence is discussed that sheds light on the intriguing possibility of action-perception couplings, that is, the idea that perception is shaped by sensory consequences of actions.

Martin Rolfs, Richard Schweitzer

Coupling perception to action through incidental sensory consequences of motor behaviour