Motion extrapolation in visual processing: Lessons from 25 years of flash-lag debate

Abstract

Because of the delays inherent in neural transmission, the brain needs time to process incoming visual information. If these delays were not somehow compensated, we would consistently mislocalize moving objects behind their physical positions. Twenty-five years ago, Nijhawan used a perceptual illusion he called the flash-lag effect (FLE) to argue that the brain's visual system solves this computational challenge by extrapolating the position of moving objects (Nijhawan, 1994). Although motion extrapolation had been proposed a decade earlier (e.g., Finke et al., 1986), the proposal that it caused the FLE and functioned to compensate for computational delays was hotly debated in the years that..