Why a moving object can seem to travel farther
A brief glimpse of motion is not stored like a frozen photograph. The visual system has to interpret changing signals from the eyes, and those signals take time to process. To keep a moving object from seeming perpetually behind its actual location, the brain uses its direction and speed to estimate where it is going.
That estimate can carry into memory. In a phenomenon called representational momentum, people may remember a moving object as being slightly farther along its path than where it disappeared or stopped. The mind’s record is not simply a snapshot of the final visible frame; it can include a small forward projection.
A prediction, not a view through the wall
If a ball passes behind a wall, you may expect it to continue on its established path. That expectation helps you make sense of interrupted motion, but it does not mean you literally see the hidden ball. Rather, the remembered endpoint can be shifted in the direction the ball was moving.
The effect reveals a useful tradeoff in perception: the brain favors a coherent estimate of ongoing motion over a perfectly static record of the last image. Usually, that helps objects seem continuous despite brief interruptions. But when you later judge exactly where motion ended, the same forward-looking process can make the endpoint seem a little farther away than it was.
