Motion behind occluder: Amodal perception and visual motion extrapolation

One of the main challenges that our visual system must resolve is to judge the current position of an occluded moving object. This computation is known as motion extrapolation (ME), and it is required to perform several tasks: for example, judging when an occluded moving target collides with a given cue or whether it reappeared in time. These tasks may easily be encountered in more ecological settings, highlighting the importance of ME in our daily life. The goal of the current review is to synthesize the existing literature that investigated targets during occluded motion, in order to provide a general overview of the topic. To this aim, different aspects are discussed: occluded motion as a true perceptual phenomenon, the commonly used tasks in the literature, how perceptual and cognitive factors may affect individual performance, which mechanisms are supposed to be involved during ME and, finally, the neural correlates of occluded motion perception.