This paper proposes a physiologically plausible neural network model that can detect preferred motion direction. This model differs from earlier works which considers only static responses of ganglion cells. The ON/OFF cells response sequence to a light edge moving across receptive fields (RF) is used for motion direction detection. The ...

The primate visual system uses form cues-such as hue, contrast polarity, luminance, and texture-to segment complex retinal images into the constituent objects of the visual scene. We investigated whether segmentation of dynamic images on the basis of hue, luminance contrast polarity, or luminance contrast amplitude aids discrimination of motion direction. ...

The effects of attentional spread were studied by having subjects detect a luminance increment along a row of evenly spaced dots. The increment could occur for the central, fixated dot (Narrow Attention) or for either the fixation dot or one of the four dots to its left or right (Broad ...

The characteristics of directionally selective cells in area 17 of the cat are studied using moving random pixel arrays (RPAs) with 50% white and 50% black pixels. The apparent motion stimulus is similar to that used in human psychophysics [Fredericksen et al. (1993). Vision Research, 33, pp. 1193-1205]. We compare ...

Real-ear directional sensitivity patterns were obtained from a group of eight subjects wearing in-the-ear and completely-in-the-canal-placed microphones to determine whether depth of microphone placement within the ear affects electroacoustic estimates of directionality. Both conventional and extended versions of the Unidirectional Index and the Directivity Index were used to estimate directional ...

This study employed a selective adaptation paradigm and investigated thresholds for direction discrimination of translational stereoscopic motion (moving binocular disparity information). The stimuli were moving arrays of randomly positioned stereoscopic discs created from disparity embedded in dynamic random-element stereograms. When discrimination thresholds were measured across a range of base directions ...

How does voluntary attention to one attribute of a visual stimulus affect the neural processing of that stimulus? We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the attentional modulation of neural activity in the human homolog of the MT-MST complex, which is known to be involved in the processing of ...

We tested motion direction discrimination with random dot cinematograms (RDCs) projected into the contralateral homonymous visual field defects of 10 patients with unilateral cerebral hemispheric lesions. Five patients had medial occipital lesions that spared the putative motion area in lateral occipitotemporal cortex and the optic radiations and other white matter ...

The present investigation explored the extent to which extrastriate cortex is necessary for various aspects of motion processing and whether the processing of first-order (Fourier) and second-order (non-Fourier) motion involves the same extrastriate cortical regions. Orientation, direction, and speed discrimination thresholds were measured in 21 patients with unilateral damage to ...

A study is reported of phenomena involved in perceptually unified organisation of a stationary chromatic pattern and a moving black outline or dot pattern. When the corners of the outline pattern were temporally oscillated on a stationary chromatic square, the chromatic border appeared to follow the moving outline, as if ...

Experiments were performed to study the influence of the cerebellar anterior vermis on both amplitude and directional properties of the vestibulospinal (VS) reflexes. In decerebrate cats, the multiunit EMG activity of the medial head of the forelimb extensor triceps brachii was recorded during wobble of the whole animal at 0.15 ...

The misperceived direction of type-II plaids has posed a problem for the intersection of constraints (IOC) model of two-dimensional motion perception. Alais et al. (1994, Vision Research, 34, 1823-1834) examined the perceived direction of type-II plaids and concluded that in addition to the direction signalled by the IOC process, a ...

A method that allows the creation of moving random-dot patterns with any desired level of motion coherence is presented. In the present context, a random-dot pattern with 100% coherence is a sliding sheet of dots (all dots move at the same speed and in the same direction). A random-dot pattern ...

To determine the mechanism underlying motion transparency, representative examples of motion transparency are listed and possible mechanisms are suggested. Those are feature tracking, multiple spatial-frequency channels, luminance-based transparency rules, and motion energy. Next, an interesting stimulus for motion transparency is introduced, namely superimposed dense random-dot patterns, which is not explained ...

When two moving sinusoidal gratings, with similar spatial frequency, contrast, phase, but different orientation are combined to form a plaid, their perceived direction of motion has been predicted by the intersection of constraints rule (IOC) (Adelson & Movshon, Nature, 300, 523-525, 1982). However, at short durations (60 msec) the direction ...

The goal of this study was to explore the functional organization of direction of motion in cat area 18. Optical imaging was used to record the activity of populations of neurons. We found a patchy distribution of cortical regions exhibiting preference for one direction over the opposite direction of motion. ...

To better understand how local motion detectors merge their responses so as to permit the global determination of objects' movements in the visual field, direction discrimination of performance was measured using a flexible class of moving dots--two sets of dots translating sinusoidally 90 deg out of phase along orthogonal axes. ...

Thresholds for the detection of rotation and divergence in the presence of a translational component in sparse random dot patterns are determined for human observers and two computer algorithms. The algorithms only make use of local velocity directions and not of local velocity magnitude (speed). The results show that psychophysical ...

We evaluated the effect of +3.25 dioptres of optical blur on the discrimination of motion direction in random dot cinematograms. Dot displacement between frames varied from 2.1 to 63' of visual angle while the temporal interval was held constant. Optical blur worsened discrimination in three normal subjects at displacements below ...

We tested motion perception and smooth pursuit in 26 patients with unilateral cerebral hemispheric lesions. We used random dot cinematograms to test motion direction discrimination. We measured pursuit gain as they followed a predictable sinusoidal target moving horizontally at three different frequencies, and an unpredictable horizontal step-ramp target in the ...

Using random dot stimuli well controlled for dot speed, we found that the moving features in expanding patterns appear to move faster than those in rotating patterns. The illusion is well correlated with the strength of the global motion signal. For example, in displays where the number of motion directions ...

We examined the responses to transparent motion of complex cells in cat area 17 which show directional selectivity to moving random pixel arrays (RPAs). The response to an RPA moving in the cell's preferred direction is inhibited when a second RPA is transparently moving in another direction. The inhibition by ...

We studied the accuracy of human subjects in perceiving the direction of self-motion from optic flow, over a range of directions contained in a 45 deg cone whose vertex was at the viewpoint. Translational optic flow fields were generated by displaying brief sequences (< 1.0 sec) of randomly positioned dots ...

An analysis of previous studies of bilateral symmetry detection in dot patterns revealed what appeared to be an almost arbitrary choice of pattern parameters and constraints with no systemic examination of the effects of these parameters and constraints on observer performance. In Expt 1, 100-dot patterns either had no constraints ...

We measured directional sensitivity to a foreground pattern while an orthogonally directed background pattern was present under transparent motion conditions. For both foreground and background pattern, the speed was varied between 0.5 and 28 deg sec-1. A multi-step paradigm was employed which results in a better estimation of the suppressive ...

Motion coherence thresholds in random-dot patterns have been widely adopted as a measure of performance in visual motion processing. However, there has been diversity in the type of "noise" in which a coherent motion signal has to be detected. Here we compare coherence thresholds for three ways of creating motion ...

A global dot-motion stimulus was employed in order to investigate the interaction between luminance and chromatic signals in motion processing. Thresholds are determined by measuring the minimum number of dots which need to move in a coherent fashion in a field of randomly moving dots in order for the observers ...

Recent studies have clearly demonstrated that the activity of directionally selective neuronal populations in the middle temporal (MT) and medial superior temporal (MST) cortical areas plays a direct role in the judgment of the direction of visual motion. However, the way in which the information is derived from a population ...

Opponency between opposite directions of motion is a characteristic of many models of movement detection and is commonly invoked in explanations of the motion after-effect. If detection of opposite directions is mediated by a single mechanism, then a single, smooth psychometric function for the discrimination of global direction in random-dot ...

1. Processing of visual information in primates is believed to occur in at least two separate cortical pathways, commonly labeled the "form" and "motion" pathways. This division lies in marked contrast to our everyday visual experience, in which we have a unified percept of both the form and motion of ...

The ability of infants to discriminate between opposite directions of motion was examined in infant control habituation experiments. A group of 3-5-week-olds showed no evidence of discrimination between a random-dot pattern which was segregated into regions that moved in opposite directions, and a uniform pattern in which the dots all ...

The ability of infants to discriminate between opposite directions of motion was assessed using forced-choice preferential looking between a random-dot pattern which was segregated into regions which moved in opposite directions, and a uniform pattern in which all the dots moved in the same direction. The first experiment measured velocity ...

Across four experiments, this study investigated direction-specific adaptation and simultaneous contrast induced by moving binocular disparity information (stereoscopic motion). The stimuli were moving arrays of stereoscopic dots created from dynamic random-element stereograms. Experiments 1 and 2 examined the effects of adaptation to motion in a given direction on the apparent ...

This paper demonstrates that much of visual motion coding in the primary visual cortex can be understood from a theory of efficient motion coding in a multiscale representation. The theory predicts that cortical cells can have a spectrum of directional indices, be tuned to different directions of motion, and have ...

1. We showed previously that neurons in the dorsal spinocerebellar tract (DSCT) may encode whole-limb parameters of movement and posture rather than localized proprioceptive information. Neurons were found to respond to hindlimb movements in the sagittal plane with maximum activity for foot placements in one direction and minimum activity for ...

We measured the perceived direction of one motion component as a function of the contrast and speed of a second component for three pattern classes: plaids with two different spatial frequency components, multi-aperture patterns, and contrast-modulated (CM) patterns. The components were moving at +/- 63.4 or +/- 71.6 deg to ...

The head-direction (HD) cells found in the limbic system in freely mov ing rats represent the instantaneous head direction of the animal in the horizontal plane regardless of the location of the animal. The internal direction represented by these cells uses both self-motion information for inertially based updating and familiar ...

1. Single binocularly driven complex neurons in cat striate cortex were recorded extracellularly under nitrous oxide-oxygen-halothane anesthesia and muscle relaxant. Orientational/directional tuning was initially derived for each eye in turn, with sine wave gratings of optimal spatial frequency and velocity, while the other eye viewed a uniform field. 2. For ...

Several aspects of the viewing situation affect the ability to determine heading from optical flow. These include the amount of depth variation and number of texture elements in the scene, the location and amount of the visual field stimulated, and the position of the focus of expansion within the stimulus. ...

Many visual experiments call for visual displays in which dots are plotted with very fine positional accuracy. Spatial hyperacuities and motion displacement thresholds can be as low as 5 sec arc. On computer graphics displays small angular displacements of a pixel can be obtained only with long viewing distances which ...

Evidence is reported that stationarity rather than motion can be perceived for displaced stimuli, not because of insufficient motion energy for the stimulus to activate individual motion detectors, but because of cooperative interactions that actively suppress the perception of motion. A long row of evenly spaced dots was presented in ...

Stoner, Albright and Ramachandran [(1990) Nature, 344, 153-155] found that moving rectangular-wave plaid patterns that admitted a transparency interpretation appeared to segment that "slide" past one another as the plaids were translated, while the components of plaids that did not admit a transparency interpretation appeared to unify and move rigidly ...

A potential source of information about spatial layout, surface slant, and self-motion is provided by transformations of the optic flow field. Theoretical analyses have demonstrated that such flow fields can be decomposed into translation, rotation, expansion, and deformation components. The objective in this study was to investigate the effectiveness of ...

Detection of vertical bilateral symmetry has previously been studied in patterns composed of black or white dots on a grey background under four conditions: (a) same contrast (black or white) for all dots (called BB or WW, for 'all black or all white'); (b) half of the dots black and ...

A series of experiments investigated perceived direction of motion and depth segregation in motion transparency displays consisting of two planes of dots moving in different directions. Direction and depth judgments were obtained from human observers viewing these "bi-directional" animation sequences with and without explicit stereoscopic depth information. We found that ...

The cat's lateral posterior-pulvinar complex (LP-pulvinar) establishes reciprocal connections with the anterior ectosylvian visual (AEV) and lateral suprasylvian (LS) cortices; two regions which are believed to be involved in motion analysis. We have investigated the motion sensitivity of neurons in the LP-pulvinar complex by: (1) studying the responses properties of ...

The present study investigated the proximal constraints that determine perceptual unit formation under minimal stimulus conditions. Projections of three moving dots, which could form two possible two-dot configurations, were presented to naive observers. In a forced-choice situation, their task was to report which two-dot configuration was perceived as a distinct ...

We examined how the direction of apparent motion in one part of a scene can propagate and constrain motion direction in another part. The stimulus scene consisted of an array of dots all moving in the same physical direction at the same time. According to the proximity rule, the dots ...

The spatial organization of receptive fields in the middle temporal (MT) area of anaesthetized and paralysed macaque monkeys was studied. In all, 288 neurons were successfully recorded. The size and shape of the receptive field (RF) was mapped with small patches of translating random dots and the resulting data were ...

In conventional presentations of random-dot kinematograms, two frames of random dots are presented in temporal sequence, separated by a blank inter-stimulus interval, and a coherent offset in spatial position is added to dots in one frame relative to dots in the other frame. Direction discrimination performance is limited temporally to ...