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Macaque Monkeys Perceive the Flash Lag Illusion

Transmission of neural signals in the brain takes time due to the slow biological mechanisms that mediate it. During such delays, the position of moving objects can change substantially. The brain could use statistical regularities in the natural world to compensate neural delays and represent movin...

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Autores principales: Subramaniyan, Manivannan, Ecker, Alexander S., Berens, Philipp, Tolias, Andreas S.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2013
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3602542/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23527024
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0058788
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author Subramaniyan, Manivannan
Ecker, Alexander S.
Berens, Philipp
Tolias, Andreas S.
author_facet Subramaniyan, Manivannan
Ecker, Alexander S.
Berens, Philipp
Tolias, Andreas S.
author_sort Subramaniyan, Manivannan
collection PubMed
description Transmission of neural signals in the brain takes time due to the slow biological mechanisms that mediate it. During such delays, the position of moving objects can change substantially. The brain could use statistical regularities in the natural world to compensate neural delays and represent moving stimuli closer to real time. This possibility has been explored in the context of the flash lag illusion, where a briefly flashed stimulus in alignment with a moving one appears to lag behind the moving stimulus. Despite numerous psychophysical studies, the neural mechanisms underlying the flash lag illusion remain poorly understood, partly because it has never been studied electrophysiologically in behaving animals. Macaques are a prime model for such studies, but it is unknown if they perceive the illusion. By training monkeys to report their percepts unbiased by reward, we show that they indeed perceive the illusion qualitatively similar to humans. Importantly, the magnitude of the illusion is smaller in monkeys than in humans, but it increases linearly with the speed of the moving stimulus in both species. These results provide further evidence for the similarity of sensory information processing in macaques and humans and pave the way for detailed neurophysiological investigations of the flash lag illusion in behaving macaques.
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spelling pubmed-36025422013-03-22 Macaque Monkeys Perceive the Flash Lag Illusion Subramaniyan, Manivannan Ecker, Alexander S. Berens, Philipp Tolias, Andreas S. PLoS One Research Article Transmission of neural signals in the brain takes time due to the slow biological mechanisms that mediate it. During such delays, the position of moving objects can change substantially. The brain could use statistical regularities in the natural world to compensate neural delays and represent moving stimuli closer to real time. This possibility has been explored in the context of the flash lag illusion, where a briefly flashed stimulus in alignment with a moving one appears to lag behind the moving stimulus. Despite numerous psychophysical studies, the neural mechanisms underlying the flash lag illusion remain poorly understood, partly because it has never been studied electrophysiologically in behaving animals. Macaques are a prime model for such studies, but it is unknown if they perceive the illusion. By training monkeys to report their percepts unbiased by reward, we show that they indeed perceive the illusion qualitatively similar to humans. Importantly, the magnitude of the illusion is smaller in monkeys than in humans, but it increases linearly with the speed of the moving stimulus in both species. These results provide further evidence for the similarity of sensory information processing in macaques and humans and pave the way for detailed neurophysiological investigations of the flash lag illusion in behaving macaques. Public Library of Science 2013-03-19 /pmc/articles/PMC3602542/ /pubmed/23527024 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0058788 Text en © 2013 Subramaniyan et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Subramaniyan, Manivannan
Ecker, Alexander S.
Berens, Philipp
Tolias, Andreas S.
Macaque Monkeys Perceive the Flash Lag Illusion
title Macaque Monkeys Perceive the Flash Lag Illusion
title_full Macaque Monkeys Perceive the Flash Lag Illusion
title_fullStr Macaque Monkeys Perceive the Flash Lag Illusion
title_full_unstemmed Macaque Monkeys Perceive the Flash Lag Illusion
title_short Macaque Monkeys Perceive the Flash Lag Illusion
title_sort macaque monkeys perceive the flash lag illusion
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3602542/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23527024
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0058788
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