To ensure clear vision even at high speeds, ISTA scientists discover how the brain corrects visual distortions brought on by movement.

A group of neuroscientists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), under the direction of Professor Maximilian Jösch, have discovered a crucial mechanism that enables the brain to rectify movement-induced visual distortions. The study, which was carried out in mice, finds a basic mechanism that applies to the visual systems of all vertebrates, including humans. Nature Neuroscience reported the results.

Even expensive action cameras can't match the human eye's capacity to sustain steady, crisp vision while moving, despite advances in camera technology. This begs the fascinating question: how can the brain accomplish such accuracy?

Together with co-first authors Tomas Vega-Zuniga, Anton Sumser, and Olga Symonova, Jösch's study team used state-of-the-art methods to identify a particular area of the mouse brain that anticipates and corrects motion-induced distortions. Deep inside the lateral thalamus, this area—known as the ventral lateral geniculate nucleus (vLGN)—combines motor and sensory inputs to produce a corrective response.

Image stabilization happens early in the visual processing stage, even before information reaches higher-level brain areas that comprehend complicated visual data, according to the study. The mammalian brain effectively corrects distortions by anticipating how movement would impact vision, exhibiting a sophisticated natural process similar to sophisticated video optimization software.

This finding not only broadens their knowledge of how the brain interprets visual information, but it may also have ramifications for future developments in motion-capture and artificial vision systems.