Visual-motor adaptation to stabilize perceptual world

Abstract

Though the retinal image changes drastically with the movement of our head or eyes, our perceptual world is stable. It is called visual stability or position constancy. When we observe a virtual-reality environment through a head-mounted display with moving our head, the perceptual world is stabilized by the appropriate visual-motor gain without significant system delay. It is known that when the gain is changed the visual stability adaptively changes. We aimed to know the generality and specificity of this adaptation to stabilize the perceptual world: What is limitation for the ability of our adaptive visual-motor system? We found that the visual-motor adaptation occurred irrespective of the amount of visual information or active/passive movement. Even though the eye for adapting and that for test were different, the adaptation was intact. When the retinal location (left or right hemi-field) for test was different from that for adaptation, the adaptation still occurred, but it was less than in the case of same retinal location. Thus, the visual-motor adaptation for visual stability is concerned with relatively higher information processing, at least after the fusion of binocular sources, but is specific to or modulated by the retinal location.