During self-movement humans are better at judging whether an object is moving (flow parsing) than whether they will hit it (heading)

Abstract

During locomotion we can use information in the retinal flow field to judge whether we will pass to the left or right of an object in the scene (heading). We can also use information in retinal flow to judge whether an object is moving relative to the scene (flow parsing). Both judgements rely on the brain identifying optic flow (global patterns of retinal motion that are characteristic of self-movement). How does the precision of these two judgments compare? Differences or similarities in precision may provide some insight into the underpinning mechanisms. We designed stimuli that allowed direct comparison of the precision of the two judgements. In the heading task, we ...