How Perception Anticipates and Reflects Physical Principles

It takes a few hundred milliseconds for information arriving at the eye to be transmitted to and processed by the brain. Thus, it is unclear how we interact with a moving object in real time, as perceptual experience of such an object would seem to necessarily lag behind that object’s actual position. In a series of experiments, observers viewed displays of moving objects that vanished without warning, and those observers subsequently indicated where the objects vanished. Judged vanishing point of a moving target was displaced from the actual vanishing point in the direction of anticipated motion (referred to as representational momentum), and this displacement was larger for horizontal motion and for faster targets. Subsequent experiments found displacements consistent with effects of gravity and friction (referred to as representational gravity and representational friction, respectively) on the moving target. These displacements (a) adjust perceived location to help compensate for delays in perception due to neural processing times, (b) bridge the gap between perception and action (c) offer a parsimonious explanation for other perceptual biases (e.g., flash-lag effect, looming effect), and (d) demonstrate one way in which perception has been shaped to reflect and anticipate invariant physical properties of the world.