Keeping vision stable: rapid updating of spatiotopic receptive fields may cause relativistic-like effects

People shift their gaze more frequently than they realize, sometimes smoothly to track objects in motion, more often abruptly with a saccade to bring a new part of the visual field under closer visual examination. Saccades are typically made three times a second throughout most of our waking life, but they are rarely noticed. Yet they are accompanied by substantial changes in visual function, most notably suppression of visual sensitivity, mislocalization of spatial position and misjudgements of temporal duration and order of stimuli presented around the time. Here we review briefly these effects, and expound a novel theory of their cause. In order to preserve visual stability, receptive fields undergo a fast but not instantaneous remapping at the time of saccades. If the speed of remapping approaches the physical limit of neural information transfer, it may lead to the relativistic-like effects that are observed psychophysically, namely a compression of spatial relationships and a dilation of time