Active head movements contribute to spatial updating across gaze shifts

Keeping visual space constant across movements of the eye and head is a not yet fully understood feature of perception. To understand the mechanisms that update the internal coordinates of space, research has mostly focused on eye movements. However, in natural vision, head movements are an integral part of gaze shifts that enlarge the field of vision. Here, we directly compared spatial updating for eye and head movements. In a virtual reality environment, participants had to localize the position of a stimulus across the execution of a gaze shift. We found that performing head movements increased the accuracy of spatial localization. By manipulating the speed of the visual scene displacement that a head movement produced, we found that spatial updating takes into account the sensorimotor contingencies of vision. When we presented gaze-contingent visual motion, subjects overestimated the position of stimuli presented across gaze shifts. The overestimation decreased if subjects were allowed to perform eye movements during the head movement. We conclude that head movements contribute to stabilizing visual space across gaze shifts and that contingencies of head movements, rather than being cancelled, facilitate the updating.