Paradoxical stabilization of relative position in moving frames

Significance Every eye movement drags the visual scene over our retinas and yet nothing appears to move. We now report a small-scale version of this visual stability with a square frame moving on a monitor in a well-lit room. Probes flashed before and after the frame’s motion are also stabilized in the frame’s coordinates—as if the frame were stationary—shifting perceived locations by up to half the screen’s width from their physical locations. Paradoxically, with these small frames, this ∼100% stabilization occurs despite visible frame motion. Unlike motion-induced position shifts, frame-induced shifts are independent of speed and depend instead on the distance the frame travels. This powerful discounting of motion may reveal a critical component of visual stability. To capture where things are and what they are doing, the visual system may extract the position and motion of each object relative to its surrounding frame of reference [K. Duncker, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 161–172 (1929) and G. Johansson, Acta Psychol (Amst.) 7, 25–79 (1950)]. Here we report a particularly powerful example where a paradoxical stabilization is produced by a moving frame. We first take a frame that moves left and right and we flash its right edge before, and its left edge after, the frame’s motion. For all frame displacements tested, the two edges are perceived as stabilized, with the left edge on the left and right edge on the right, separated by the frame’s width as if the frame were not moving. This stabilization is paradoxical because the motion of the frame itself remains visible, albeit much reduced. A second experiment demonstrated that unlike other motion-induced position shifts (e.g., flash lag, flash grab, flash drag, or Fröhlich), the illusory shift here is independent of speed and is set instead by the distance of the frame’s travel. In this experiment, two probes are flashed inside the frame at the same physical location before and after the frame moves. Despite being physically superimposed, the probes are perceived widely separated, again as if they were seen in the frame’s coordinates and the frame were stationary. This paradoxical stabilization suggests a link to visual stability across eye movements where the displacement of the entire visual scene may act as a frame to stabilize the perception of relative locations.