Recalibration of time and space in perception and action

How action trains perception

Two crucial requirements must be kept to guarantee a successful interaction with our environment: (i) our brain must keep motor and perceptual space aligned and (ii) we must distinguish motion on the retina produced by own movements from that of external stimuli. With regard to the requirement (i), I will present results from experiments demonstrating separate but interacting neural maps for motor and visual space. Saccades and their ensuing motor errors contribute differently to the recalibration of motor and visual space. In order to meet requirement (ii), I will argue, the brain attenuates sensory input during saccades if it matches stored sensorimotor contingencies. Our data show that we do not perceive the retinal motion that is produced by saccades because the sensorimotor system predicts and attenuates it.