Abstract
During the last decades, many studies have examined the pattern of errors that people make when localizing stimuli that are presented briefly (flashed) near the time of saccadic eye movements. One systematic feature of the errors is a systematic mislocalization towards the endpoint of the saccade. This phenomenon is called perisaccadic compression and its cause is not clear yet. We have proposed that perisaccadic compression arises from a combination of temporal uncertainty about the time of the flash and a bias to believe that what one has seen was where one was looking (Maij et al., 2011, Matziridi et al., 2014; 2015). If this is really the cause, we expect perisaccadic compression to be correlated with any other measure of uncertainty that we can measure. We expect participants who are uncertain about the location of a flash to take more time to indicate its perceived location. We therefore reanalysed the data of several previous studies to examine whether the amount of compression is correlated with the time it takes participants to indicate the perceived location of the flash. We found, indeed, that participants who took longer to respond (indicating a high uncertainty) had higher levels of compression than ones who took less time to respond (indicating a low uncertainty). This finding supports the idea that uncertainty plays a crucial role in the errors that are made when localizing perisaccadically flashed stimuli.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2017