Neuromagnetic activity in medial parietooccipital cortex reflects the perception of visual motion during eye movements

Abstract

We usually perceive a stationary, stable world despite coherent visual motion induced by eye movements. This astonishing example of perceptual invariance results from a comparison of visual information with internal reference signals (nonretinal signals) predicting the visual consequences of an eye movement. The important consequence of this concept is that our subjective percept of visual motion reflects the outcome of this comparison rather than retinal image slip. To localize the cortical networks underlying this comparison, we compared magnetoencephalography (MEG) responses under two conditions of pursuit-induced retinal image motion, which were identical physically but—due to different calibrational states of the nonretinal signal prompted under our experimental conditions—gave rise to different percepts of visual motion. This approach allows us to demonstrate that our perception of self-induced visual motion resides in comparably “late” parts of the cortical hierarchy of motion processing sparing the early stages up to cortical area MT/V5 but including cortex in and around the medial aspect of the parietooccipital cortex as one of its core elements.