Unveiling the time course of visual stabilization through human electrophysiology

Positions of objects are coded relative to their surroundings, presumably providing visual stability even when we move our eyes around a visual scene. But when does this perceived stability of objects arise? Here we use a visual illusion, the frame-induced position shift, and measure electrophysiological activity elicited by an object whose perceived position is either shifted due to a surrounding frame or not, thus dissociating perceived and physical locations. We found that early visually-evoked responses were sensitive to physical location information earlier in time (~70ms) than perceived location information (~140ms). Furthermore, we show that location information can be reliably decoded across physical and perceived locations during the later time interval (140-180ms) but not during the earlier time interval (70-110ms). Together these results suggest that visual stability of objects emerges relatively late and is thus dependent on recurrent feedback from higher processing stages.