Perisaccadic perception of flashing stimulus: Spatial and temporal aspects

When the eye moves through a constantly flashing light, we can observe the so-called phantom array-a line of light dashes. Our approach involves varying the flashing frequency of the light stimulus, aiming to find how the spatial and temporal characteristics of the phantom array depend on the frequency of light. The observers performed a 40° saccade across a flashing light and had to indicate the beginning and end of the phantom array, the length of a single dash, and the number of dashes they perceived. The trials of different flashing frequencies were varied randomly from 50 Hz to 3.5 kHz. We found that the number of perceived dashes was much smaller, and the perceived length of the phantom array was much shorter than the physical stimulation. However, the perceived length of dashes was the same as physically projected on the retina. Our results suggest a two-stage process which operates in phantom array perception: number compression and information processing by quantum mechanism.