ABSTRACT
The question of how it is possible that the world is usually perceived as stationary during eye movements—which cause the image of the visual world to move across the retinae—has been an issue of hot debate for many years. Attempts to answer it have resulted in two opposed schools of thinking about the mechanism subserving the perception of object motion. On the one hand there is what here will be called Direct Perception theory, which originated mainly from the writings of Gibson (1968, 1979). The alternative approach, here termed Inferential theory, stems mainly from the ideas proposed by Helmholtz (1867), Von Holst (1954), Von Holst and Mittelstaedt (1950) and Sperry (1950), (see also Mittelstaedt, 1990).
