Temporal dynamics of the twinkle-goes illusion and its relationship to neural theta oscillations

Visual motion signals are useful in predicting the future, and can affect the detectability and phenomenology of vision in various ways. Recent research has demonstrated that the disappearance position of a moving object is perceived as shifted in the direction of motion when the background consists of dynamic noise. This "twinkle-goes" illusion is thought to arise from a positional prediction overshoot that occurs because dynamic noise delays the accumulation of sensory evidence needed to register the disappearance. In Experiment 1, we examined the temporal dynamics of this illusion by measuring the illusory position shift using a probe at various positions along the motion trajectory and at different time points after the object's physical vanishing. The illusory position shift was nearly zero at the moment the moving object vanished, and subsequently gradually increased as a function of time up to ~ 120 ms after vanishing. In Experiment 2, motivated by prior reports of rhythmic fluctuations in both behavior and neural activity, we investigated whether neural theta oscillations were involved in the illusion. We found that the size of the illusory position shift correlated with the theta phase before vanishing. Taken together, these results suggest that the positional prediction of a moving object is slow-paced and rhythmically updated in synchrony with theta oscillations.