Through the eye, slowly: delays and localization errors in the visual system.

Department of Neurobiology, UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, California 90095-1763, USA.jschlag@ucla.edu; msr@ucla.edu

Reviews on the visual system generally praise its amazing performance. Here we deal with its biggest weakness: sluggishness. Inherent delays lead to mislocalization when things move or, more generally, when things change. Errors in time translate into spatial errors when we pursue a moving object, when we try to localize a target that appears just before a gaze shift, or when we compare the position of a flashed target with the instantaneous position of a continuously moving one (or one that appears to be moving even though no change occurs in the retinal image). Studying such diverse errors might rekindle our thinking about how the brain copes with real-time changes in the world.

PMID: 11994751 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]