Abstract:

Rapid eye, head, and body movements allow us to extract new information upon each gaze fixation. But the consequences of such visual actions go beyond their intended sensory outcomes of placing the fovea at different parts of the visual scene. On the one hand, intrinsic consequences accompany movement preparation as covert internal processes (e.g., predictive changes in the deployment of visual attention). On the other hand, visual actions have incidental consequences, side effects of moving the sensory surface to its intended goal (e.g., global motion of the retinal image during saccades). After a brief overview of this trinity of sensory consequences of visual actions (intended, intrinsic, incidental), I will focus on incidental sensory consequences of rapid eye movements: their phenomenology, their utility for sensory and motor functions, and their apparent traces in the setup of the visual system. Together, these findings reinforce the insight that, in order to understand perception, we must examine how actions shape sensory input.