How similar are responses to background motion and target displacements?

When making a goal-directed movement towards a target, our hand follows abrupt background motion. This response resembles that of a shift in the target’s position. Does background motion simply change the position towards which the movement is guided? If so, the response to background motion should resemble the response to a target displacement. To find out whether this is the case, we ran two exploratory studies where we asked participants to hit a moving target at a specified moment. At various times during the hand’s movement, the background could move briefly at one of several speeds, and for various durations. The response to abrupt background motion was larger when the background moved later in the movement and when the background moved faster, in line with known responses to target displacements. The response to a second epoch of background motion was smaller than it would have been if there had been no first epoch, in contrast to responses to multiple target displacements. If the background was already moving before the target appeared, the hand even moved in the opposite direction. Thus, the response to background motion and that to a target displacement are clearly not identical, but they do share several features.