Visual space curves before eye movements

Abstract

Despite the incessant retinal disruptions that necessarily accompany eye movements, our percept of the visual world remains continuous and stable—a phenomenon referred to as spatial constancy. How the visual system achieves spatial constancy remains unclear despite almost four centuries worth of experimentation. Here I measured visual sensitivity at geometrically symmetric locations, observing transient sensitivity differences between them where none should be observed if cells that support spatial constancy indeed faithfully translate or converge. These differences, recapitulated by a novel neurobiological mechanical model, reflect an overriding influence of putative visually transient error signals that curve visual space. Intermediate eccentric locations likely to contain retinal disruptions are uniquely affected by curved visual space, suggesting that visual processing at these locations is transiently turned off before an eye movement, and with the gating off of these error signals, turned back on after an eye-movement— a possible mechanism underlying spatial constancy.