Researchers gain new insights into how we perceive motion.

In the early 1990’s, John Skinner, who is a computer technician at Vanderbilt, was living in Los Angeles. Early one Sunday morning, he was shaken out of slumber by an earthquake. He rolled out of bed and stumbled over to the doorway where he braced himself during the few seconds that the quake continued. “The strangest thing about the whole experience was that the building around me did not look like it was moving even though I could feel the motion,” he recalls.

The fact that the walls and the objects in the room did not appear to be moving during the quake could well be a visual illusion caused by a special mechanism that the brain uses to pick out moving objects, says Joseph Lappin and Duje Tadin. The psychology professor and graduate student are the primary authors on a study that sheds new light on the way that this mechanism works that helps explain why Skinner did not see the shaking motions that he could clearly feel.

By David F. Salisbury
July 22, 2003