title: Sir Charles Bell on visual direction.
abstract: Helmholtz is usually credited with demonstrating the relationship between the perception of visual direction and eye muscle activity: he said that directional judgements resulted from the effort of will involved in altering the position of the eyes. However, Bell reached the same conclusion many years earlier, primarily on the basis of experiments with afterimages: an afterimage appeared to move with voluntary movement of the eye, but it appeared stationary when the eye was moved passively.
mesh_terms: D000360:Afterimage; D005133:Eye Movements; D049672:History, 19th Century; D009039:Motion Perception / Q000502:physiology; D009801:Oculomotor Muscles / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*