Persistence of vision

Persistence of vision is the brief continuation of visual perception after a stimulus disappears. The phrase is also used in popular explanations of how motion pictures appear continuous.

Afterimage: A visual image that remains after its inducing stimulus has been removed. A visible afterimage is one clear form of a lingering visual impression.
Phenakistiscope: A nineteenth-century spinning disk that creates an animation when viewed through slits in a mirror. Its successive drawings are often explained using persistence of vision.
Peter Mark Roget: An English physician and lexicographer who published an early account of apparent motion in 1824. His 1824 paper on the persistence of vision helped inspire investigations of optical animation.
Apparent motion: The perception of movement produced by a sequence of stationary stimuli. It is the broader perceptual effect that persistence-of-vision explanations often attempt to account for.
Photoreceptor adaptation: A change in retinal photoreceptor sensitivity in response to sustained or repeated light exposure. Retinal adaptation contributes to some lingering visual effects, though it is not the whole explanation.
Zoetrope: A rotating cylinder with slits and sequential pictures that appear animated when viewed through the openings. The device turns discrete images into an apparent moving scene.
Joseph Plateau: A Belgian physicist whose experiments on visual perception and rotating images influenced early animation devices. Plateau developed the phenakistiscope and studied visual effects associated with moving images.
Motion perception: The visual processing that enables organisms to detect movement in their environment. Motion perception involves neural computations beyond an image briefly lingering.
Temporal integration: The visual system's combination of information gathered across a short interval of time. Temporal integration helps explain why rapidly changing images can be perceived as continuous.
Praxinoscope: An animation device that uses mirrors inside a rotating drum to display successive images. Its clearer reflections offered an alternative to the zoetrope's viewing slits.

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