We studied the effect of static pitch body tilts on the perception of self-motion direction induced by a visual stimulus. Subjects were seated in front of a screen on which was projected a 3D cluster of moving dots visually simulating a forward motion of the observer with upward or downward ...

Reconstruction of neural current sources from magnetoencephalography (MEG) data provides two independent estimates of the instantaneous current modulus and its direction. Here, we explore how different information on the modulus and direction affects the inter-hemisphere connectivity of the human medial temporal complex (hMT+). Connectivity was quantified by mutual information values ...

A number of previous studies have extensively investigated directional anisotropy in motion perception. However, consensus has not been reached regarding the nature of motion directional anisotropies in human vision. In this study, we investigated the directional anisotropy of human motion perception by moving random-dot stimuli in the peripheral upper visual ...

Direction-selective ganglion cells (DSGCs) fire robustly for stimuli moving along one direction of motion and are strongly inhibited by stimuli moving in the opposite, or null, direction. In contrast to direction-selective neurons in primary visual cortex, a role for neural activity in the development of direction-selective retinal circuits has not ...

Looking at the inside edge of the road when steering a bend seems to be a well-established strategy linked to using a feature called the tangent point. An alternative proposal suggests that the gaze patterns observed when steering result from looking at the points in the world through which one ...

A study shows that spatial learning is accompanied by the reorganization of place fields of hippocampal CA1 neurons, and that this reorganization is subsequently reactivated in an NMDA-dependent manner for memory consolidation.

In a recent study (Fan, Z., & Harris, J. (2008). Perceived spatial displacement of motion-defined contours in peripheral vision. Vision Research, 48(28), 2793-2804), we demonstrated that virtual contours defined by two regions of dots moving in opposite directions were displaced perceptually in the direction of motion of the dots in ...

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a technique used to study perceptual, motor, and cognitive functions in the human brain. Its effects have been likened to a "virtual brain lesion," but a direct test of this assumption is lacking. To verify this hypothesis, we measured psychophysically the interaction between the neural ...

Displaced starburst amacrine cells (SACs) are retinal interneurons that exhibit GABA( A ) receptor-mediated and Cl (-) cotransporter-mediated, directionally selective (DS) light responses in the rabbit retina. They depolarize to stimuli that move centrifugally through the receptive field surround and hyperpolarize to stimuli that move centripetally through the surround (Gavrikov ...

A facile chemical method has been developed to synthesise highly efficient functionalized carbon dots; when illuminated with 407 nm light, both the solution and film emitted white-light directly.

The waggle dance of the honey bee is used to recruit nest mates to a resource, though direction indicated for a resource may vary greatly within a single dance. Some authors suggest that this variation exits as an adaptation to distribute recruits across a patch of flowers, and that, due ...

Discriminating the identity of static face views is viewpoint-dependent (Lee, Matsumiya, & Wilson, 2006), yet the benefit of facial motion on improving cross-view discrimination remains unclear. We investigate here, whether seeing a face rotating in a single direction reduces the viewpoint dependence of neighboring views, in particular, along the trajectory ...

Attended stimuli typically evoke larger event-related potentials (ERPs) than unattended stimuli. We previously reported an exception when an optic-flow pattern is interleaved with stationary dots. Reversals of motion direction evoked a larger N200 peak when attention was directed to the stationary dots. We replicated and further characterized this result: the ...

We show that ultrafast carrier dynamics plays an important role on slow- and fast-light effects based on coherent population oscillations in quantum-dot semiconductor waveguides. Fast light in the gain regime and slow light in the absorption regime are found to be enhanced at frequencies beyond the usual limits of the ...

Several recent studies have shown that extracting pattern motion direction is a dynamical process where edge motion is first extracted and pattern-related information is encoded with a small time lag by MT neurons. A similar dynamics was found for human reflexive or voluntary tracking. Here, we bring an essential, but ...

In the visual system, neurons with similar functional properties such as orientation and direction selectivity are clustered together to form modules. Optical imaging recordings in combination with episodic paradigms have been previously used to estimate direction selectivity, a fundamental property of visual neurons. The major drawback of the episodic approach ...

There is evidence that human observers are more sensitive to the direction-of-heading of point-light walkers defined by first-order than second-order motions. We addressed this question by measuring the minimum direction difference (azimuth) that observers could discriminate when the dots composing the walkers were conveyed by first or second-order motions. Sensitivity ...

How does nearby motion affect the perceived speed of a target region? When a central drifting Gabor patch is surrounded by translating noise, its speed can be misperceived over a fourfold range. Typically, when a surround moves in the same direction, perceived centre speed is reduced; for opposite-direction surrounds it ...

We report a novel unipolar light-emitting device architecture that operates using direct-current, field-driven electroluminescence of colloidally synthesized quantum dots (QDs). This device architecture, which is based only on transparent ceramics and QDs, enables emission from different color QDs and, for the first time, constant QD electroluminescence during extended operation in ...

Under 502 nm turquoise light combined with 590 nm yellow light and in total darkness, European robins, Erithacus rubecula, no longer prefer their migratory direction, but exhibit so-called fixed direction responses that do not show the seasonal change between spring and autumn. We tested robins under these light conditions in ...

We have investigated the global and local motion tuning properties of curvature coding mechanisms using two shape after-effects believed to be mediated by curvature-sensitive mechanisms: the shape-frequency after-effect, or SFAE, and the shape-amplitude after-effect, or SAAE. The SFAE and SAAE are the phenomena in which adaptation to a sine-wave-shaped contour ...

Reports an error in "Experts appear to use angle of elevation information in basketball shooting" by Rita Ferraz de Oliveira, Raôul R. D. Oudejans and Peter J. Beek (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2009[Jun], Vol 35[3], 750-761). On page 754 of the article, Figure 3 was repeated ...

Spontaneous preferences towards possible prey have been little investigated using targets in motion. Preferences of domestic chicks (Gallus gallus) to peck at video-images of stimuli representing live insects moving along their longer body axis (i.e. "forwards") or along the shorter body axis (i.e. "sideways") were investigated. Chicks presented with both ...

It is necessary for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) to be non-offensive devices for daily use to improve the quality of life of users, especially for the motor disabled. Some BCIs which are based on steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs), however, are unpleasant because users have to gaze at high-speed blinking light ...

The response of motion-sensitive neurons to stimuli presented within their receptive field is often affected by stimulation in the surrounding region. These effects have perceptually relevant consequences that can be measured using behavioral techniques. We used psychophysical reverse correlation to characterize directional selectivity in human observers while they processed a ...

Many bees and wasps learn about the immediate surroundings of their nest during learning flights, in which they look back towards the nest and acquire visual information that guides their subsequent returns. Visual guidance to the nest is simplified by the insects' tendency to adopt similar viewing directions during learning ...

Quantum dots (QDs) are a novel class of inorganic fluorophores, which are gaining widespread recognition as a result of their exceptional photophysical properties. They are rapidly being integrated into existing and emerging technologies, and could play an important role in many areas in the future. Significant phenomena, such as photoactivation, ...

Human perception of speed declines with age. Much of the decline is probably mediated by changes in the middle temporal (MT) area, an extrastriate area whose neural activity is linked to the perception of speed. In the present study, we used random-dot patterns to study the effects of aging on ...

We performed macroscopic experiments on the motion of a sphere through an array of obstacles that highlight the deterministic nature of the lateral displacements that lead to particle separation in microfluidic systems. The motion of the spheres is irreversible and displays directional locking. The locking directions can be predicted with ...

Recently, we showed that tactile speed estimates are modified by the spatial parameters of moving raised-dot surfaces, specifically dot spacing but not dot disposition (regular, irregular) or density. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which tactile roughness perception resembles tactile speed with respect to its ...

Using SFM we have observed a peculiar twisting motion of diblock macromolecules pre-collapsed in ethanol vapour during their subsequent spreading in water vapour. The intrinsic asymmetry of the diblock macromolecules has been considered to be the reason for such twisting. Further, friction-deposited PTFE nano-stripes have been employed as nano-trails with ...

The purposes of this study were to determine whether gaze direction provides a control signal for movement direction for a pointing task requiring a step and to gain insight into why discrepancies previously identified in the literature for endpoint accuracy with gaze directed eccentrically exist. Straight arm pointing movements were ...

Participants judged the number of dots in visual displays with brief presentations (200 msec), such that the numerosity judgment was based on an instantaneous impression without counting. In some displays, pairs of adjacent dots were connected by line segments, whereas, in others, line segments were freely hanging without touching the ...

For successful basketball shooting, players must use information about the location of the basket relative to themselves. In this study, the authors examined to what extent shooting performance depends on the absolute distance to the basket (m) and the angle of elevation (alpha). In Experiment 1, expert players took jump ...

Random dot motion (RDM) displays have emerged as one of the standard stimulus types employed in psychophysical and physiological studies of motion processing. RDMs are convenient because it is straightforward to manipulate the relative motion energy for a given motion direction in addition to stimulus parameters such as the speed, ...

Breathing instruction for classical singing is becoming more physiologically focused, yet the effect of chest-wall kinematic directives on breathing behaviour is largely unexplored. Five female classical singers sang Caccini's Ave Maria without directive and under two directives: 'steadily pull the abdomen inward' and 'steadily expand the abdomen' through each phrase. ...

Perception of shaded three-dimensional figures is inherently ambiguous, but this ambiguity can be resolved if the brain assumes that figures are lit from a specific direction. Under the Bayesian framework, the visual system assigns a weighting to each possible direction, and these weightings define a prior probability distribution for light-source ...

We investigated whether direction information is represented in the population-level neural response evoked by the visual motion stimulus, as measured by magnetoencephalography. Coherent motions with varied speed, varied direction, and different coherence level were presented using random dot kinematography. Peak latency of responses to motion onset was inversely related to ...

When individually moving elements in the visual scene are perceptually grouped together into a coherently moving object, they can appear to slow down. In the present article, we show that the perceived speed of a particular global-motion percept is not dictated completely by the speed of the local moving elements. ...

Recent research confirms that observers' judgments of projected final destinations of axis-trajectory misaligned moving figures are biased in the direction of primary axis deviation from trajectory, a phenomenon we named the axis-aligned motion (AAM) bias. The present study tests whether this bias occurs in a large, immersive mixed-reality environment that ...

We consider the motion of an overdamped Brownian particle in a washboard potential exerted to a static tilting force. The bias yields directed net particle motion, i.e., a current. It is demonstrated that with an additional time-delayed feedback term, the particle current can be reversed against the direction of the ...

Selective responses of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) to the direction of motion have been recorded extracellularly from the rabbit and the mouse retina at eye opening. Recently, it has been shown that the development of this circuitry is light independent. Using whole-cell patch clamp recording, we report here that mouse ...

The perceived direction of a moving line changes, often markedly, when viewed through an aperture. Although several explanations of this remarkable effect have been proposed, these accounts typically focus on the percepts elicited by a particular type of aperture and offer no biological rationale. Here, we test the hypothesis that ...

Normal observers perceive less motion smear if a target moves in the opposite direction of a smooth eye movement than if the target moves to produce the same retinal image speed in the same direction as the eye movement. This study investigated whether a similar asymmetrical attenuation of perceived motion ...

When oblique rows of black and white dots drifted horizontally across a mid-grey surround, the perceived direction of motion was shifted to be almost parallel to the dotted lines and was often nearly orthogonal to the real motion. The reason is that the black/white contrast signals between adjacent dots along ...

Modulation of steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) by directing gaze to targets flickering at different frequencies has been utilized in many brain-computer interface (BCI) studies. However, this paradigm may not work with patients suffering from complete locked-in syndrome or other severe motor disabilities that do not allow conscious control of ...

Studying directional selectivity using neuroimaging in humans is difficult because the resolution is insufficient to directly access directionally selective activity. Here we used motion adaptation of the steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) and source imaging in the frequency domain to detect brain areas that contain direction-selective cells. This study uses ...

We present experimental and computational evidence for the estimation of visual and proprioceptive directional information during forward, visually driven arm movements. We presented noisy directional proprioceptive and visual stimuli simultaneously and in isolation midway during a pointing movement. Directional proprioceptive stimuli were created by brief force pulses, which varied in ...

To explore the nature of specific interactions between concurrent perception and action, participants were asked to move one of their hands in a certain direction while simultaneously observing an independent stimulus motion of a (dis)similar direction. The kinematics of the hand trajectories revealed a form of contrast effect (CE) in ...

Motion-induced blindness (MIB) occurs when a dot embedded in a motion field subjectively vanishes. Here we report the first psychophysical data concerning effects of microsaccade/eyeblink rate upon perceptual switches during MIB. We find that the rate of microsaccades/eyeblink rises before and after perceptual transitions from not seeing to seeing the ...