Absence of spatial updating when the visuomotor system is unsure about stimulus motion.

How does the visuomotor system decide whether a target is moving or stationary in space or whether it moves relative to the eyes or head? A visual flash during a rapid eye-head gaze shift produces a brief visual streak on the retina that could provide information about target motion, when appropriately combined with eye and head self-motion signals. Indeed, double-step experiments have demonstrated that the visuomotor system incorporates actively generated intervening gaze shifts in the final localization response. Also saccades to brief head-fixed flashes during passive whole-body rotation compensate for vestibular-induced ocular nystagmus. However, both the amount of retinal motion to invoke spatial updating and the default strategy in the absence of detectable retinal motion remain unclear. To study these questions, we determined the contribution of retinal motion and the vestibular canals to spatial updating of visual flashes during passive whole-body rotation. Head- and body-restrained humans made saccades toward very brief (0.5 and 4 ms) and long (100 ms) visual flashes during sinusoidal rotation around the vertical body axis in total darkness. Stimuli were either attached to the chair (head-fixed) or stationary in space and were always well localizable. Surprisingly, spatial updating only occurred when retinal stimulus motion provided sufficient information: long-duration stimuli were always appropriately localized, thus adequately compensating for vestibular nystagmus and the passive head movement during the saccade reaction time. For the shortest stimuli, however, the target was kept in retinocentric coordinates, thus ignoring intervening nystagmus and passive head displacement, regardless of whether the target was moving with the head or not.