Eye movements and visible persistence explain the mislocalization of the final position of a moving target

Abstract

When observers are asked to localize the final position of a moving target, the judged position is usually displaced from the actual position in the direction of motion. The short-term time course of the displacement was investigated to test theories that attribute the localization error to spatial and temporal properties of human perception or to representational momentum. It was found that briefly after target offset, the judged position is already displaced in the direction of motion. It is argued that the shift results from eye movements after target offset that move the target's persisting image in the direction of motion.