Stationary Objects Flashed Periodically Appear to Move During Smooth Pursuit Eye Movement

We discovered that a white disc flashed twice at the same location appears to move during smooth pursuit eye tracking in the direction opposite to that of the eye movement. We called this novel phenomenon movement-induced apparent motion (MIAM). Using the method of constant stimuli, we measured the required displacement of the second appearance of the disc in the pursuit direction to null the effect during the closed-loop stage of smooth pursuit eye tracking. We observed a strong linear relationship between the points of subjective stationarity and the inter-stimuli intervals for four smooth pursuit eye movement speeds. The slopes and y-intercepts of these linear fits were well predicted by the hypothesis according to which subjects saw illusory motion from the first to the second retinal projections of the flashed disc during smooth pursuit eye movement, with no extra-retinal signal compensation.