Unveiling the time course of visual stabilization through human electrophysiology

Abstract

Positions of objects are coded relative to their surroundings, presumably providing visual stability even when we move our eyes around a visual scene. But when does this perceived stability of objects arise? Here we use a visual illusion, the frame-induced position shift, and measure electrophysiological activity elicited by an object whose perceived position is either shifted due to a surrounding frame or not, thus dissociating perceived and physical locations. We found that early visually-evoked responses were sensitive to physical location information earlier in time ([~]70ms) than perceived location information ([~]140ms). Furthermore, we show that location information can be reliably decoded across physical and perceived locations during the later time interval (140-180ms) but not during the earlier time interval (70-110ms). Together these results suggest that visual stability of objects emerges relatively late and is thus dependent on recurrent feedback from higher processing stages.