Figure 8.

Smooth pursuit with an unexpected trajectory change – with and without high-level precision: this figure reports the simulations of occluded periodic motion with a reversal in the direction of the trajectory at the beginning of the second cycle (plain black line). The broken traces in black correspond to normal pursuit and the broken traces in red show the performance under reduced precision. Although the effect is small, reducing the precision about prior beliefs produces more accurate pursuit performance, both in terms of the displacement between the target and center of gaze and in terms of a slight reduction in the peak velocity during the compensatory eye movement (red circles). This illustrates the paradoxical improvement of performance that rest upon precise sensory information that cannot be predicted a priori (and is characteristic of syndromes like schizophrenia and autism).