Purchase this article with an account.
Eli Brenner, Jeroen Smeets; Introduction to active vision: the complexities of continuous visual control. Journal of Vision 2013;13(9):1375. doi: 10.1167/13.9.1375.
Download citation file:
© ARVO (1962-2015); The Authors (2016-present)
Perception is often studied in terms of image processing: an image falls on the retina and is processed in the eye and brain in order to retrieve whatever one is interested in. Of course the eye and brain analyse the images that fall on the retina, but it is becoming ever more evident that vision is an active process. Images do not just appear on the retina, but we actively move our eyes and the rest of our body, presumably to ensure that we constantly have the best possible information at our disposal for the task at hand. We do this despite the complications that moving sometimes creates for extracting the relevant information from the images. I will introduce some of the complications and benefits that arise from such active vision on the basis of research on the role of pursuing an object with one's eyes when trying to intercept it. People are quite flexible in terms of where they look when performing an interception task, but where they look affects their precision. This is not only due to the inhomogeneity of the retina, but also to the fact that neuromuscular delays affect the combination of information from different sensory modalities. The latter can be overcome by relying as much as possible on retinal information (such as optic flow) but there are conditions in which people do not do so but rely on combinations of retinal and extra-retinal information instead (efferent and afferent information about one's own actions).
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2013
This PDF is available to Subscribers Only