News

20262025202420232022

"The brain uses eye movements to see in 3D"

Wednesday, February 4, 2026

Contrary to long-standing beliefs, motion from eye movements helps the brain perceive depth—a finding that could enhance virtual reality.

When you go for a walk, how does your brain know the difference between a parked car and a moving car? This seemingly simple distinction is challenging because eye movements, such as the ones we make when watching a car pass by, make even stationary objects move across the retina—motion that has long been thought of as visual “noise” the brain must subtract out.

Now, researchers at the University of Rochester have discovered that instead of being meaningless interference, the visual motion of an image caused by eye movements helps us understand the world. The specific patterns of visual motion created by eye movements are useful to the brain for figuring out how objects move and where they are located in 3D space.

“The conventional idea has been that the brain needs to somehow discount, or subtract off, the image motion that is produced by eye movements, as this motion has been thought to be a nuisance,” says Greg DeAngelis, George Eastman Professor; professor in the Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Neuroscience, and Biomedical Engineering and the Center for Visual Science; member of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience; and lead author of the new research, published in Nature Communications. “But we found that the visual motion produced by our eye movements is not just a nuisance variable to be subtracted off; rather, our brains analyze these global patterns of image motion and use this to infer how our eyes have moved relative to the world.”