Treadmill Experience Alters Treadmill Effects on Perceived Visual Motion

Information on ongoing body movements can affect the perception of ambiguous visual motion. Previous studies on “treadmill capture” have shown that treadmill walking biases the perception of ambiguous apparent motion in backward direction in accordance with the optic flow during normal walking, and that long-term treadmill experience changes the effect of treadmill capture. To understand the underlying mechanisms for these phenomena, we conducted Experiment 1 with non-treadmill runners and Experiment 2 with treadmill runners. The participants judged the motion direction of the apparent motion stimuli of horizontal gratings in front of their feet under three conditions: walking on a treadmill, standing on a treadmill, and standing on the floor. The non-treadmill runners showed the presence of downward bias only under the walking condition, indicating that ongoing treadmill walking but not the awareness of being on a treadmill biased the visual directional discrimination. In contrast, the treadmill runners showed no downward bias under any of the conditions, indicating that neither ongoing activity nor the awareness of spatial context produced perception bias. This suggests that the long-term repetitive experience of treadmill walking without optic flow induced the formation of a treadmill-specific locomotor-visual linkage to perceive the complex relationship between self and the environment.