Spatial distortion induced by imperceptible visual stimuli

Saccades create similar mislocalizations in visual and auditory space

Orienting our eyes to a light, a sound, or a touch occurs effortlessly, despite the fact that sound and touch have to be converted from head- and body-based coordinates to eye-based coordinates to do so. We asked whether the oculomotor representation is also used for localization of sounds even when there is no saccade to the sound source. To address this, we examined whether saccades introduced similar errors of localization judgments for both visual and auditory stimuli. Sixteen subjects indicated the direction of a visual or auditory apparent motion seen or heard between two targets presented either during fixation or straddling a saccade. Compared with the fixation baseline, saccades introduced errors in direction judgments for both visual and auditory stimuli: in both cases, apparent motion judgments were biased in direction of the saccade. These saccade-induced effects across modalities give rise to the possibility of shared, cross-modal location coding for perception and action.

Examining the locus of the attentional attraction effect

Our spatial perception is not always veridical. Indeed, systematic distortions in localization have been found to result from orienting of attention. Distorted localization is inferred from tasks wherein the subject reports the location of centrally presented parallel (vernier) line stimuli. Particularly, prior to the presentation of the lines, a shift of attention toward peripheral cues produces a mislocalization of the line stimuli away from the cues (termed the attentional repulsion effect [ARE]). However, if the shift of attention is induced after target presentation, by reversing the order of stimulus presentation, a substantial mislocalization toward the cues (attentional attraction effect [AAE]) is found. The purpose of this study was to identify whether the AAE arises from the modulation in the same processes as the ARE. While an interocular presentation of cues to one eye and vernier lines to the other was previously shown to eliminate the ARE, the AAE persists across both the interocular and monocular conditions (both the cues and vernier lines are presented to the same eye). Considering Ono and Watanabe's (2011) suggestion that memory traces may be involved in generating the AAE, this prospect was examined by having participants delay their response for a short (100 ms) or long (1,000 ms) period of time. The magnitude of AAE was larger with a longer delay, consistent with the involvement of visual memory. Next, to directly examine the role of spatial working memory, the attentional attraction task was embedded within either a spatial memory task (remembering the locations of one or three squares) or a color memory task (remembering the color of one or three squares). Only high spatial memory load reduced the magnitude of AAE. Our results suggest the AAE relies on changes to different visual processes than does the ARE and involves spatial working memory.

Shape-assimilation effect: retrospective distortion of visual shapes

A brief visual stimulus distorts the perceived shape of a subsequent visual stimulus as being dissimilar to the shape of a previous stimulus (shape-contrast effect). In this study, we presented a visual stimulus after a to-be-estimated target stimulus and found that the perceived shape of the target stimulus appeared to be similar to the shape of the following stimulus (shape-assimilation effect). The assimilation effect occurred even when the following stimulus was presented at positions different from that of the target stimulus, indicating that the shape-assimilation effect is a nonretinotopic distortion. The results suggest that the preceding and succeeding stimuli differentially modulate the perceived shape of a briefly presented stimulus.