Illusory Snakes Might Be Due to Asynchronized Respective Field Remapping
Authors: Yousef Ahmad 
Published: June 2019

In this proposal, we try to virtually navigate inside the human brain to understand the neural mechanism of the perception of illusory snakes. To achieve this mission, we have to imagine the neural network of the visual motion perception during spontaneous saccadic eye movements; and digging into clear distinction between the foveal versus the peripheral visual receptive field remapping. We had previously discussed that conscious perception generated by the central retina has very different attributes than the visual awareness generated by the peripheral retina. It was clear that the central retina triggers visual perception which decelerates the apparent motion of the cyclic elements, and enlarge the size of these elements, see reference 2. The peripheral retina , however, not only accelerates the apparent motion, but it generates illusory motion reversals, see reference 19. Since there are clear discrepancies in the spatiotemporal characteristics between the central and the peripheral retina in the visual awareness, we hypothesized that the illusory rotating snakes might be due to asynchronized respective field remapping; namely, a rivalrous remapping processes of the central versus the peripheral retinal images. In another word, the respective field remapping process triggered by the central retina has different spatial and temporal feeds to the visual awareness than the retinal peripheries. Interestingly, it had been found that deactivating the retinal peripheries through significant reduction against the contrast of the stimulus (that may stop the retinal peripheries from signaling the brain) eliminates the rotating snakes illusion. Elimination that might evidence the role of active retinal peripheries in creating the perception of illusory snakes. Collectively, we think that illusory snakes is due to a rivalry between the central and the peripheral retina; and their corresponding conscious brains; and the saccades are nothing but to convey parts of the retinal image from the center to the peripheries, and vice versa. Namely, the illusory snakes is generated by a spontaneous saccadic rivalry between the fovea &amp; its corresponding conscious brain competing with the peripheral retina &amp; its corresponding conscious brain. Similarly, peripheral drift illusion that requires peripheral vision to be perceived, may not be generated without the aforementioned saccadic rivalry; namely, we think that the perception of that illusion may not be occurred without spontaneous saccade away from the fixational peripheral visual space, see also reference 1 and 5. That saccade is mostly due to spatial attention which conveys the retinal image from the retinal peripheries (the fixational visual space) to the central retina (the attentional visual space). Namely, we think that without the aforementioned conveyance, the perceived illusion may not be generated because the aforementioned spatiotemporal discrepancies will be terminated. Importantly, we investigated the contribution of the human medial temporal complex in producing the illusory motion conscious perception with three different mechanisms: Cognitive control, deep breathing, and the arrangements of the patterns of the building blocks. The aforementioned processes are found to alter the visual perception of rotating snakes stimulus. Inclusively, we distinguished between two distinct visual awareness, namely, the central versus the peripheral vision and we show how active vision which requires cognitive control but not passive vision can ultimately control the perception of the rotating snakes stimulus, namely, alternation between real and illusory visual awareness!