The tilt aftereffect occurs independently of the flash-lag effect

Abstract

The flash-lag effect refers to the phenomenon where a flash of a stationary stimulus presented adjacent to a moving stimulus appears to lag behind it. We investigated whether the flash-lag effect affected the tilt aftereffect using two sets of vertical gratings for a flash and a moving stimulus that created a specific orientation when aligned with a specific temporal offset. Our results show that a change in the perceptual appearance of stimuli in the presence of the flash-lag effect had a negligible influence on the tilt aftereffect. These data suggest that the flash-lag effect originates at a different neural processing stage than the early linear processing that presumably mediates the tilt aftereffect.