Do we track what we see? Common versus independent processing for motion perception and smooth pursuit eye movements: A review

Abstract

Many neurophysiological studies in monkeys have indicated that visual motion information for the guidance of perception and smooth pursuit eye movements is - at an early stage - processed in the same visual pathway in the brain, crucially involving the middle temporal area (MT). However, these studies left some questions unanswered: Are perception and pursuit driven by the same or independent neuronal signals within this pathway? Are the perceptual interpretation of visual motion information and the motor response to visual signals limited by the same source of neuronal noise? Here, we review psychophysical studies that were motivated by these questions and compared perception and pursuit behaviorally in healthy human observers. We further review studies that focused on the interaction between perception and pursuit. The majority of results point to similarities between perception and pursuit, but dissociations were also reported. We discuss recent developments in this research area and conclude with suggestions for common and separate principles for the guidance of perceptual and motor responses to visual motion information.

Oculomotor inhibition covaries with conscious detection

“…Other lines of research have investigated the relation between stimulus-driven eye movements and explicit perception (Kowler 2011;Spering and Montagnini 2011). Curious dissociations can occur, suggestive of independent sensory pathways (Spering and Carrasco 2015).…”

Coordinated Control of Three-Dimensional Components of Smooth Pursuit to Rotating and Translating Textures

“…Visual rotation has been largely neglected in studies on the visual signals that guide smooth pursuit eye movements, 16,28,29 and on the brain pathways underlying motion processing for pursuit.…”

A robust perception based method for iris tracking

“…It derives from the fact that neurons in the visual system summate information over both space and time. It turns out that the receptive fields have spatio-temporal characteristics and not only spatial [36]. It means that the evolution of luminance and contrast over time in a fixed location cannot be neglected.…”

“…One of the most interesting neurological results is that human eyes are attracted by very few points (regions) of the observed scene [18,27,30]. In addition, human eye reacts to a moving stimulus which can be modeled as a combination of luminance modulated (first order motion) and contrast modulated (second order motion) sinusoidal stimulus [36,23,19,29]. With regard to face processing, eyes belong to these attentional points [21] and iris represents its prominent and highly contrasted component; moreover iris is a moving and textured eye component.…”