The eyes have it!

摘要

The transmission of visual signals from eye to brain involves considerable delays in conduction and processing. Because stimuli of varying intensity or colour can cause different delays, it could be difficult to synchronize events from different parts of a visual scene—in particular, our perception of moving stimuli would consistently trail behind their real locations. But the visual system can circumvent such delays by anticipating the path of moving stimuli. Such motion anticipation was assumed to be controlled by high-level motion areas of the visual cortex. Now, very much to our surprise, Berry et al. (page 334 of this issue) report that motion anticipation is already accomplished to a large extent in the retina, by neural circuits that were discovered long ago.