Study title

Safe movement through the environment requires us to monitor our surroundings for moving objects or people. However, identification of moving objects in the scene is complicated by self- movement, which adds motion across the retina. To identify world-relative object movement, the brain thus has to ‘compensate for’ or ‘parse out’ the components of retinal motion that are due to self-movement. We have previously demonstrated that retinal cues arising from central vision contribute to solving this problem. Here, we investigate the contribution of peripheral vision, commonly thought to provide strong cues to self-movement (for the publication, see Related Resources). Stationary participants viewed a large field of view display, with radial flow patterns presented in the periphery, and judged the trajectory of a centrally presented probe. Across two experiments, we demonstrate and quantify the contribution of peripheral optic flow to flow parsing during forward and backward movement. The archived data is described in Rogers, C., Rushton, S.K. & Warren, P.A. (2017). Peripheral visual cues contribute to the perception of object movement during self-movement iPerception, volume 8, issue 6 (see Related Resources for weblink).A long-standing question is how the brain transforms the light patterns impinging onto the retina into a meaningful world of objects and animates with which the observer can interact. While enormous progress has been made in the understanding of brain functions during the last few decades, the fundamental principles underlying the processing and extraction of visual information remain elusive. This project builds on the observation that perception has been traditionally studied in a passive manner, paying relatively little attention to the observer's motor activity during the acquisition of visual information. Yet, like other species, humans are not passively exposed to the incoming flow of sensory data. Instead, they actively seek useful...