Abstract

In normal viewing, our eye movements are characterized as a sequence of fixations separated by rapid eye movements. Rapid (saccadic) eye movements impose a challenging problem to our visual system because they generate rapid image smear on the retina, and change the relationship between spatial locations in external space and the corresponding image positions on the retina. However, we are usually unaware of retinal image motion or rapid changes in their spatial location resulting from our own movements. Our brain must successfully deal with abrupt changes in visual information caused by saccadic eye movements, since we perceive a continuous, clear view of a stable world despite saccades. The neural mechanism of visual stability has been an intriguing question for vision scientists for over 100 years, and it has been suggested that extra-retinal information representing the occurrence of an eye movement is utilized in visual information processing. In this talk, I will summarize the relationship between saccadic eye movements and visual perception focusing on the roles of the extra-retinal information for perception of visual motion, space and time. I will also present results from experiments manipulating the extra-retinal signal.