The peripheral drift illusion: A motion illusion in the visual periphery

Circularly repeating patches containing sawtooth luminance gradients produc e a sensation of motion when viewed in the periphery. Illusory motion is pe rceived in a dark-to-light direction, but only when one's gaze is directed to different locations around the stimulus, a point outside the display is fixated and the observer blinks, or when the stimulus is sequentially displ ayed at different locations whilst the observer fixates one point. We propo se that the illusion is produced by the interaction of three factors: (i) i ntroducing transients as a result of eye movements or blinks; (ii) differin g latencies in the processing of luminance; and (iii) spatiotemporal integr ation of the differing luminance signals in the periphery.