Citation

Spering M, Pomplun M, Carrasco M. Psychol. Sci. 2011; 22(2): 216-225.

Affiliation

1Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science, New York University.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1177/0956797610394659

PMID

21189353

PMCID

PMC3162322

Abstract

Can people react to objects in their visual field that they do not consciously perceive? We investigated how visual perception and motor action respond to moving objects whose visibility is reduced, and we found a dissociation between motion processing for perception and for action. We compared motion perception and eye movements evoked by two orthogonally drifting gratings, each presented separately to a different eye. The strength of each monocular grating was manipulated by inducing adaptation to one grating prior to the presentation of both gratings. Reflexive eye movements tracked the vector average of both gratings (pattern motion) even though perceptual responses followed one motion direction exclusively (component motion). Observers almost never perceived pattern motion. This dissociation implies the existence of visual-motion signals that guide eye movements in the absence of a corresponding conscious percept.

Language: en