Abstract
Nakayama and Holcombe (2021) found that on a dynamic noise background, the perceived disappearance location of a moving object is shifted in the direction of motion, but not on a static noise background. The present study investigates the temporal evolution processes of this motion-induced position shift. In a psychophysical experiment, the amount of the shift was estimated by a judgement task of the disappearance location of a moving object relative to a flash presented with variable spatiotemporal offsets across trials. The position shift was zero if the flash coincided with the moving object’s disappearance, after which the position shift gradually evolved in the pre-disappearance motion direction until ~120 ms, implying a relatively sluggish evolution process. In an EEG experiment, the amount of the shift was estimated on every trial by an adjustment task of the locations of stationary objects to be matched with the disappearance locations of moving objects. The amount of the position shift correlated with parietal theta phase (3-5 Hz) for several hundred milliseconds before the disappearance (~-600-0 ms), and also with theta power after the disappearance (~0-400 ms). ERP analyses further revealed a correlation between the position shift and anterior late negativity (~300-600 ms). The overall results suggest that the theta phase predicts the temporal evolution period of a motion-induced position shift, and that the theta power increases during the temporal evolution. The anterior late negativity may represent prediction error signals for ceasing the temporal evolution.