Document Detail


Residual motion perception in a "motion-blind" patient, assessed with limited-lifetime random dot stimuli.
MedLine Citation:
PMID:  1992012     Owner:  NLM     Status:  MEDLINE    
Abstract/OtherAbstract:
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 motion perception, only being able to perform well for very high values of coherence. Different versions of the stimulus were employed to separate out the effects of limited lifetime versus the effects of additive noise as coherence was lowered. When all "signal" dots had a fixed, specified value of lifetime, and varying percentages of "noise" dots were added, the patient showed a profound deficit. In contrast, a stimulus consisting of no noise dots at all, and signal dots having fixed values of lifetime, revealed relatively good performance for surprisingly brief dot lifetimes. Thus, it is the presence of noisy, incoherent dot motion, rather than brief lifetimes, that causes such poor performance on the stimulus of Newsome and Pare (1988). Most surprising was the finding that the presence of even very small percentages of stationary noise dots was sufficient to disrupt totally direction discrimination of moving signal dots. The findings reported here suggest that one major role of extrastriate cortical processing might be the interpretation of stimuli that suffer from an impaired signal-to-noise ratio; the most commonly encountered form of "noise" would presumably be contamination by irrelevant directional spatio-temporal frequency components.
Authors:
C L Baker; R F Hess; J Zihl
Publication Detail:
Type:  Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't    
Journal Detail:
Title:  The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience     Volume:  11     ISSN:  0270-6474     ISO Abbreviation:  J. Neurosci.     Publication Date:  1991 Feb 
Date Detail:
Created Date:  1991-03-08     Completed Date:  1991-03-08     Revised Date:  2006-11-15    
Medline Journal Info:
Nlm Unique ID:  8102140     Medline TA:  J Neurosci     Country:  UNITED STATES    
Other Details:
Languages:  eng     Pagination:  454-61     Citation Subset:  IM; S    
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
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MeSH Terms
Descriptor/Qualifier:
Humans
Motion Perception / physiology*
Perceptual Disorders / physiopathology*
Photic Stimulation / methods*
Random Allocation
Time Factors

From MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine


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