Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 28, 2026

A Naturalistic Setup for Presenting Real People and Live Actions in Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience Studies
Published on: August 4, 2023
Actions as perceptual experiments
Eckart Zimmermann1,2, Antonella Pomè1,3
1Institute for Experimental Psychology, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany.
Abstract:
How do we know where (and when) things happen? We review evidence that actions operate as experiments that test and recalibrate internal spatial hypotheses. Postsaccadic errors across ∼100,000 daily saccades induce serial dependencies that shift visual localization. During eye-head gaze shifts, the brain compares expected self-generated motion with sensed motion; subtle velocity-gain perturbations bias perception and head kinematics. In locomotion, manipulating optic-flow speed changes walked distance and, in turn, rescales perceived depth. Temporal reproduction shows serial dependence within action but little transfer to visual time perception. Together, these findings support a unifying perspective on visual space perception as a permanent and active probing of our internal predictions about the environment.
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