What you see is what you set – the position of moving objects

Human observers consequently misjudge the position of moving objects towards the direction of motion. This so called flash-lag effect is supposed to be related to very basic processes such as processing latencies in the human brain. In our study we show that this effect can be inversed by changing the task-set of the observer. A top-down change of the observers attentional set leads to a different perception of otherwise identical scenes. Cognitive theories regard the misperception of the moving object as an important feature of attention-mediated processing, because it reflects the prioritized processing of important objects.