Why do our mental images stay sharp even when we are moving fast? A team of neuroscientists led by Professor Maximilian Jösch at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) has identified a mechanism that corrects visual distortions caused by movement in animals. The study, conducted in mice, identifies a core function that can be generalized across the vertebrate visual system, including primates such as humans. The findings are published in Nature Neuroscience.
Despite its rapid development in recent decades, the video camera industry is still catching up with the capabilities of the human eye. In particular, action cams are designed to capture footage while immersed in the action. As we judge footage quality and the need for fancy equipment and optimization software based on the abilities of the human eye, a question arises: How do our eyes do it so well?
Researchers led by Professor Maximilian Jösch at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) have now answered this question with a technical tour de force. The three scientists and co-first authors Tomas Vega-Zuniga, Anton Sumser, and Olga Symonova combined a range of state-of-the-art techniques to identify a brain region in the mouse that can predict and minimize how movements distort the visual signal. This brain region, residing deep in the brain, literally copies the brain’s motor commands to suppress movement-induced distortions. “We show that the image correction happens very early during visual processing-before the information is transmitted to other areas of the brain that are