Perceptual stabilization is weaker in older adults and correlates with spatial suppression of motion, providing behavioral evidence that these two mechanisms are linked and may reflect shared motion-processing mechanisms that weaken with age.
Older adults exhibited weaker spatial suppression of motion than younger adults.
Older adults exhibited weaker perceptual stabilization of fixational eye movements than younger adults.
The suppression index was positively correlated with the stabilization index across all participants.
Fixation stability did not differ between younger and older adults.
Spatial suppression and perceptual stabilization are two distinct motion processing mechanisms that both reduce the influence of redundant motion signals.
This research suggests that two different ways the brain filters out unhelpful motion information — one that reduces sensitivity to large background motion (called spatial suppression) and one that compensates for the eye's own tiny involuntary movements during fixation (called perceptual stabilization) — are linked to each other and both become weaker as people age. The study tested 34 younger adults (ages 19–35) and 34 older adults (ages 60–80) on separate tasks measuring each of these abilities, and found that people who were better at one tended to be better at the other, regardless of age group. Older adults scored lower on both measures compared to younger adults. Importantly, the researchers also measured how steady participants could hold their gaze (fixation stability) and found no difference between the age groups. This means the older adults' weaker perceptual stabilization was not simply because their eyes moved around more — instead, it appears their brains were less effective at processing and compensating for eye movement-related motion signals. This points to a shared underlying neural mechanism for both functions that declines with age. This research suggests that age-related changes in motion perception may be broader and more interconnected than previously understood, affecting multiple aspects of how the visual system handles motion at once. Understanding these links could eventually help explain why older adults sometimes have more difficulty in visually complex or moving environments, and may inform future research into the neural basis of motion processing across the lifespan.
Nandagopal P, McKendrick A, Anderson A. (2026). Perceptual stabilization is weaker in older adults and correlates with spatial suppression of motion.. Journal of vision. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.26.10.15