Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: When localising a moving object, the brain receives outdated sensory information about its position, due to the time required for neural transmission and processing. The brain may overcome these fundamental delays through predictively encoding the position of moving objects using information from their past trajectories. In the present study, we evaluated this proposition using multivariate analysis of high temporal resolution electroencephalographic data. We tracked neural position representations of moving objects at different stages of visual processing, relative to the real-time position of the object. We found that, during early stimulus-related activity (100-160ms), the activations of position representations of moving objects were shifted substantially earlier than the equivalent activity evoked by unpredictable flashes, but subsequently followed the same processing time-course. This shift was sufficient to bring the early representations ($\sim$70-80ms) of the moving object into alignment with its real-time position. These findings indicate that the predictability of straight trajectories enables full compensation for the neural delays accumulated early in stimulus processing, but that delays still accumulate across later stages of cortical processing.