Ferrera and Wilson [(1990) Vision Research, 30, 273-287] reported veridical perception of the direction of motion of Type I plaids, whose component gratings span the resultant direction, but marked misperception of the direction of motion of Type II plaids, whose component gratings both lie on one side of the resultant ...

A tactile stimulator was built for studying motion processing in the somatic sensory system of primates. This stimulator is used for assessing the responses of neurons of the somatic sensory system to stimuli moving in any traverse distance (range: 2-20 mm), with a variety of velocities (range: 4-120 mm/s), forces ...

A functional two-dimensional silicon retina that computes a complete set of local direction-selective outputs is reported. The chip motion computation uses unidirectional delay lines as tuned filters for moving edges. Photoreceptors detect local changes in image intensity, and the outputs from these photoreceptors are coupled into the delay line, where ...

Stroboscopic simulations of three-dimensional rotating rigid structures can be perceived as highly nonrigid. To investigate this nonrigidity effect a sequence of either three (experiment 2 and 3) or thirty six frames (experiment 4) was used, each consisting of a set of dots with location on the horizontal axis corresponding to ...

Random-dot cinematograms in which each dot's successive movements are randomly drawn from a Gaussian distribution of directions can produce a percept of global coherent motion in a single direction. Discrimination of global direction was measured for various exposure durations, stimulus areas, and dot densities and bandwidths of the distribution of ...

A technique is described and tested for mapping the sensitivities and preferred directions of motion at different locations within the receptive fields of direction-selective motion-detecting visual neurons. The procedure is to record the responses to a number of visual stimuli, each stimulus presentation consisting of a set of short, randomly-oriented, ...

Recent findings suggest that the visual system is biased by its past stimulation to detect one direction of motion over others. Three experiments were designed to investigate whether this bias is mediated by the direction or by the velocity of the past stimulation, and whether this bias is offset by ...

1. We tested quantitatively the responses of 147 middle temporal (MT) cells to light and dark bars moving at different speeds ranging over a 1,000-fold range (0.5-512 deg/s). 2. We derived the following quantities from the speed-response (SR) curves obtained for opposite directions of motion. Speed selectivity was characterized by ...

Random-dot cinematograms comprising many different, spatially intermingled local motion vectors can produce a percept of global coherent motion in a single direction. Thresholds for discriminating the direction of global motion were measured under various conditions. Discrimination thresholds increased with the width of the distribution of directions in the cinematogram. Thresholds ...

1. We studied the sensitivity of auditory neurons in the barn owl's brain stem to the direction of apparent acoustic motion. Motion stimuli were generated with an array of seven free-field speakers (Fig. 2). Motion-direction sensitivity was determined by comparing the number of spikes evoked by counterclockwise (CCW) motion with ...

We have examined the human ability to determine the direction of movement of a variety of plaid patterns. The plaids were composed of two orthogonal sine-wave gratings. When the plaid components are of unequal spatial frequency or sometimes of unequal contrast, observers judge the direction of movement incorrectly. In terms ...

1. The responses of cutaneous mechanoreceptors in feline hairy skin were examined in vivo with systematic variations in the velocity and direction of stimulus motion across the receptive fields (RF). The mechanoreceptor classes studied were guard hair afferents, field afferents, down hair afferents, and slowly adapting type I (SAI) mechanoreceptors. ...

Horizontal and vertical components of optokinetic nystagmus (OKN) were measured using the magnetic search coil technique in normal human adults during presentation of simple and complex moving patterns. Simple patterns were gratings moving horizontally and obliquely. Complex moving patterns consisted of plaids formed by superimposed oblique motion of two sets ...

Two empirical studies are reported that examine active regulation of altitude as a function of the type of ground texture. Three ground textures were examined: lines perpendicular to the direction of motion, lines parallel to the direction of motion, and the combination (i.e., square or checkerboard texture). Although subjects only ...

It has been known for many years that human observers are unable to detect modest accelerations and decelerations in moving visual stimuli. We find that human observers can integrate speeds over many dots, moving at different speeds, producing a global speed percept analogous to the global direction percept first reported ...

The detectability of surface curvatures defined by optical motion was evaluated in three experiments. Observers accurately detected very small amounts of curvature in a direction perpendicular to the direction of rotation, but they were less sensitive to curvatures along the direction of rotation. Variations in either the number of points ...

Responses of 71 cells in areas 17 and 18 of the cat visual cortex were recorded extracellularly while stimulating with gratings drifting in each direction across the receptive field at a series of temporal frequencies. Direction selectivity was most prominent at temporal frequencies of 1-2 Hz. In about 20% of ...

The stimulus-response characteristics of predictive smooth pursuit eye movements near the time of predictable, abrupt changes in target motion direction were studied. Expectations about the speed and direction of target motion both before and after the direction change affected specific components of the predictive pursuit responses. We propose that, when ...

The spatial resolving capacities of the four classes of mechanoreceptive afferents innervating human fingerpad skin were investigated to determine which class sets the limit of tactile spatial resolution for scanning stimuli. The stimulus consisted of an array of embossed dots (0.7 mm diameter, 0.5 mm high) arranged in a tetragonal ...

I present a method by which direction- and speed-tuned cells, such as those commonly found in the middle temporal area of the primate brain, can be used to analyze the patterns of retinal image motion that are generated during observer movement through the environment. For pure translation, the retinal image ...

We investigated surface interpolation in displays of structure from motion (SFM). To do so, we introduced a new method for measuring surface perception in dynamic displays--the SFM probe. An SFM probe is a dot that moves rigidly with the dots on a simulated surface, and whose distance from that surface ...

Type II two-dimensional motion is produced by superimposing two one-dimensional drifting cosine gratings with velocity vectors lying on the same side of the intersection-of-constraints (IOC) resultant. When type II patterns were constructed with components having the same spatial frequency and contrast, perceived direction was found to be biased toward the ...

Spatial sensitivity (Westheimer) functions, when measured on nonuniform backgrounds made up of light dots of 12 min arc, were found to differ in shape, depending on the polarity of the central area on which the test spot was placed. When thresholds were measured on the dark centre between light dots, ...

We compared the pre- and postoperative performance of macaque monkeys on visual discrimination tasks entailing the perception of differences in the motion of two luminous spots. Animals in which area MT and adjacent regions had been surgically removed were not significantly impaired as long as there were differences in the ...

The effect upon perceived location of adding an extra dot offset from the centre of a cluster of pseudorandom dots was investigated using a vernier acuity task. With this technique, weighting functions showing the extent to which the added dot pulls the apparent location of the entire cluster can be ...

Three visual search experiments examined whether motion is coded as two separate features, speed and direction. Increasing the heterogeneity of the directions in which stimuli moved disrupted detection of a target defined by speed (fast among medium and slow nontargets), suggesting that speed is coded integrally with direction. However, heterogeneity ...

Monaural and binaural single unit responses to frequency-modulated (FM) sweeps were compared in cat primary auditory cortex (AI). Both upward-directed (changing from low to high frequency) and downward-directed (changing from high to low frequency) FM sweeps were presented monaurally and binaurally at five rates of frequency modulation (referred to here ...

Nine macaque monkeys were trained to discriminate between a display in which all the dots moved randomly (visual dynamic noise) and an adjacent display in which a proportion of the dots oscillated coherently from side to side. Two monkeys in which area MT (middle temporal visual area) and adjacent regions ...

1. Simple cells in cat striate cortex were studied with a number of stimulation paradigms to explore the extent to which linear mechanisms determine direction selectivity. For each paradigm, our aim was to predict the selectivity for the direction of moving stimuli given only the responses to stationary stimuli. We ...

1. Cells in the superficial layers of the colliculus were studied in immobilized monkeys anesthetized with nitrous oxide. We examined sensitivity to the relative motion between two stimuli: a small target in a cell's receptive field and a large random-dot background pattern that filled most of the visual field outside ...

We have compared the responses of simple cells to laterally moving sinusoidal gratings and to stationary temporally-modulated gratings. From the amplitudes and temporal phases of the responses to stationary gratings of different spatial phases, it should be possible to predict the preferred direction of movement, the amplitudes of the responses ...

A neurological patient (L.M.) suffering a specific loss of visual motion perception (Zihl et al., 1983) due to extrastriate cortical damage was studied using random dot "limited-lifetime" stimuli with a direction discrimination task. With a stimulus like that of Newsome and Pare (1988), the patient exhibited a severe deficit for ...

Shape discrimination was measured for: (i) two-dimensional rectangular targets that were perfectly camouflaged within a stationary pattern of random dots and rendered visible by relative motion of the dots, and (ii) similar dotted rectangles that were rendered visible by luminance contrast. Shape discrimination was disconfounded from size discrimination by requiring ...

We examined conditions under which two quite different types of random-dot cinematograms were perceptually matched. In one stimulus type, directions of motion were defined by a uniform distribution; in the other, directions were drawn from a discrete set of just a few, widely separated directions. Cinematograms whose range of uniformly ...

Human vision is sensitive to the coherent structure and motion of simple dot patterns undergoing rapid random transformations, even when the component dots are widely separated spatially. A study is reported in which visual sensitivity to translations, rotations, expansions, pure shear, and additive combinations of these transformations was investigated. Observers ...

This study deals with the observer's ability to discriminate the numerosity of two random dot-patterns irrespective of their relative size. One of these two patterns was a reference one that was always composed of 32 dots randomly distributed within a K x K invisible square window (K = 1.92 degrees). ...

Subjects decided whether two dots were on the same curve or on different curves in patterns consisting of two curves and two dots in displays that had an exposure duration of 200 msec or that remained in view until the subjects' response. The overall size of the patterns was varied ...

The capacity of four neurologically healthy young adults to distinguish opposing directions of cutaneous motion was determined at five different sites along the proximal-distal axis of the upper limb. Constant-velocity brushing stimuli (ranging from 0.5 to 32.0 cm/sec) were delivered through an aperture in a Teflon plate that was securely ...

We have recorded the direction of optokinetic nystagmus (OKN) elicited by moving plaid patterns in order to dissociate the pathways that mediate horizontal OKN. The plaids used comprised two drifting sinusoidal gratings arranged such that their individual directions of drift were very different from the direction of coherent motion of ...

We employed filtered random-dot kinematograms to determine the maximum displacement (dmax) at which sampled directional motion was reliably detected. The images were produced using ideal band-pass filters that varied in lower cut-off frequency (f1), in bandwidth, and in range (alpha) of component orientations that were passed. Results showed that dmax, ...

Local descriptions of velocity fields (e.g., rotation, divergence, and deformation) contain a wealth of information for form perception and ego motion. In spite of this, human psychophysical performance in estimating these entities has not yet been thoroughly examined. In this paper, we report on the visual discrimination of rotary motion. ...

Direction selectivity of motion-sensitive neurons is generally thought to result from the nonlinear interaction between the signals derived from adjacent image points. Modeling of motion-sensitive networks, however, reveals that such elements may still respond to motion in a rather poor directionally selective way. Direction selectivity can be significantly enhanced if ...

In an attempt to make an easily viewable and self-contained test for stereopsis, a white-light reflection hologram was made of a Juleszian random-dot stereogram. The resulting hologram was free of monocular cues.

Movement of an observer through the environment generates motion on the retina. This optic flow provides information about the direction of self-motion, but only if it contains differential motion of elements at different depths. If the observer tracks a stationary object while moving in a direction different from his line ...

Intracellular recordings and impedance measurements from directionally-selective visual interneurons of the lobula plate of flies show that during motion, transmembrane conductance increases during both depolarizing responses to preferred directions and hyperpolarizing responses to anti-preferred directions. This provides direct evidence that these interneurons are postsynaptic to two separate populations of excitatory ...

The short- and long-range apparent motion processes are discussed in terms of the statistical properties of images. It is argued that the short-range process, exemplified by the random-dot kinematogram, is primarily sensitive to the dipole statistics, whereas the long-range process, exemplified by illusory occlusion, is treated by the visual system ...

Direction and orientation tuning elicited by moving bars, flashing bars and a moving noise field were compared in cells in area 17 of the cat. Fourier analysis of tuning curves (SDO-analysis) was applied to quantify the general sensitivity (S) to visual stimulation, tuning strength to direction(D) and orientation (O), as ...

Dynamic random dot targets consisting of many localized motion vectors have been used to study the pooling of local motion signals into a global motion percept (Williams and Sekuler, 1984). In such displays, the dots are displaced with a constant step size and the direction of motion for each dot ...

1. The role of the microgeometry of planar surfaces in the detection of sliding of the surfaces on human and monkey fingerpads was investigated. By the use of a servo-controlled tactile stimulator to press and stroke glass plates on passive fingerpads of human subjects, the ability of humans to discriminate ...

1. We consider the consequences of the orientation selectivity shown by most cortical neurons for the nature of the signals they can convey about the direction of stimulus movement. On theoretical grounds we distinguish component direction selectivity, in which cells are selective for the direction of movement of oriented components ...