Central Visual Persistences: II. Effects of Hand and Head Rotations

In an earlier paper, kinesthetic effects on central visual persistences (CPs) were reported, including the ability to move these images by hand following eye closure. While all CPs could be translated anywhere within the frontal field, the present report documents a more selective influence of manual rotations on CPs in the same subjects. When common objects or figures drawn on cards were rotated (while holding one end of the object or one corner of a card between thumb and forefinger), it was found that CPs of larger objects rotated with the hand. By contrast, CPs of smaller objects, parts of objects, and textures remained stable in space as the hand rotated. It is proposed that CPs of smaller stimuli and textures are represented mainly by the ventral stream (temporal cortex) while larger CPs, which rotate, are represented mainly by the dorsal stream (parietal cortex). A second discovery was that CPs of small objects (but not of line segments or textures) could be rotated when the thumb and fingers surrounded the edges of the object. It is proposed that neuronal convergence of visual and tactile information about shape increases parietal responses to small objects, so that their CPs will rotate. Experiments with CPs offer new tools to infer visual coding differences between ventral and dorsal streams in man.