Facilitatory neural activity compensating for neural delays as a potential cause of the flash-lag effect

In flash-lag effect (FLE), the position of a moving object is perceived to be ahead of a brief flash when they are actually co-localized. This phenomenon may be due to motion extrapolation: the nervous system has internal conduction delay, thus signals received with a delay in central areas have to be extrapolated for the internal state to be temporally aligned with that of the environment. The precise neural mechanism of such a process has not been fully investigated. Here, we propose that facilitating synapses can be a potential candidate. We tested this idea in FLE and showed that our model behaviour is consistent with experimental data. In sum, facilitatory neural dynamics may underlie delay compensation, thus giving rise to FLE.