05/12/2026
🚨new study out!
Excited to share our newest report just published today: “Hierarchical brain dynamics supporting visual perceptual transitions”
How does the brain move from seeing the world as it is to experiencing an illusion?
We tackled this question using perceptual filling-in: a striking visual phenomenon in which, during steady fixation, a visible boundary gradually fades and the brain replaces local visual detail with a more uniform percept.
Using millisecond whole-brain imaging, invisible frequency tagging, and microsaccades as a natural perturbation of the illusion, we identified two dissociable mechanisms behind this transition:
1) Visual cortex dynamics appear to support boundary fading, with changes in excitability and alpha-band activity consistent with a shift in excitation–inhibition balance.
2) Higher-order monitoring processes involve motor cortex, reflected in high-alpha and beta-band activity as perception transitions from veridical to illusory.
A particularly exciting result 👉 microsaccades reset both processes, helping delay the illusion and revealing how tiny eye movements can reshape conscious visual experience.
Take-home 👉 conscious perception is not built by sensory cortex alone, nor only by higher-order inference. It emerges through a hierarchy of interacting visual and motor systems that jointly shape what we experience.
Grateful to the whole team: Max Levinson (who drove data collection in the middle of the 2020 lockdown and helium shortage for MEG 👏), Alice Waitt, Ph.D., Katharina Duecker, Syanah Wynn, and my identical-hair twin Ole Jensen 🙏🏼
Read the paper here in open access👇
Illusory transitions in conscious visual perception involve both early visual cortex and higher-order motor cortices.
