scholarly journals The effect of target speed on perception of visual motion direction in a patient with akinetopsia

Cortex ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 119 ◽  
pp. 511-518
Author(s):  
Joost Heutink ◽  
Gera de Haan ◽  
Jan-Bernard Marsman ◽  
Mart van Dijk ◽  
Christina Cordes
1988 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 940-965 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. R. Dursteler ◽  
R. H. Wurtz

1. Previous experiments have shown that punctate chemical lesions within the middle temporal area (MT) of the superior temporal sulcus (STS) produce deficits in the initiation and maintenance of pursuit eye movements (10, 34). The present experiments were designed to test the effect of such chemical lesions in an area within the STS to which MT projects, the medial superior temporal area (MST). 2. We injected ibotenic acid into localized regions of MST, and we observed two deficits in pursuit eye movements, a retinotopic deficit and a directional deficit. 3. The retinotopic deficit in pursuit initiation was characterized by the monkey's inability to match eye speed to target speed or to adjust the amplitude of the saccade made to acquire the target to compensate for target motion. This deficit was related to the initiation of pursuit to targets moving in any direction in the visual field contralateral to the side of the brain with the lesion. This deficit was similar to the deficit we found following damage to extrafoveal MT except that the affected area of the visual field frequently extended throughout the entire contralateral visual field tested. 4. The directional deficit in pursuit maintenance was characterized by a failure to match eye speed to target speed once the fovea had been brought near the moving target. This deficit occurred only when the target was moving toward the side of the lesion, regardless of whether the target began to move in the ipsilateral or contralateral visual field. There was no deficit in the amplitude of saccades made to acquire the target, or in the amplitude of the catch-up saccades made to compensate for the slowed pursuit. The directional deficit is similar to the one we described previously following chemical lesions of the foveal representation in the STS. 5. Retinotopic deficits resulted from any of our injections in MST. Directional deficits resulted from lesions limited to subregions within MST, particularly lesions that invaded the floor of the STS and the posterior bank of the STS just lateral to MT. Extensive damage to the densely myelinated area of the anterior bank or to the posterior parietal area on the dorsal lip of the anterior bank produced minimal directional deficits. 6. We conclude that damage to visual motion processing in MST underlies the retinotopic pursuit deficit just as it does in MT. MST appears to be a sequential step in visual motion processing that occurs before all of the visual motion information is transmitted to the brainstem areas related to pursuit.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nardin Nakhla ◽  
Yavar Korkian ◽  
Matthew R. Krause ◽  
Christopher C. Pack

AbstractThe processing of visual motion is carried out by dedicated pathways in the primate brain. These pathways originate with populations of direction-selective neurons in the primary visual cortex, which project to dorsal structures like the middle temporal (MT) and medial superior temporal (MST) areas. Anatomical and imaging studies have suggested that area V3A might also be specialized for motion processing, but there have been very few studies of single-neuron direction selectivity in this area. We have therefore performed electrophysiological recordings from V3A neurons in two macaque monkeys (one male and one female) and measured responses to a large battery of motion stimuli that includes translation motion, as well as more complex optic flow patterns. For comparison, we simultaneously recorded the responses of MT neurons to the same stimuli. Surprisingly, we find that overall levels of direction selectivity are similar in V3A and MT and moreover that the population of V3A neurons exhibits somewhat greater selectivity for optic flow patterns. These results suggest that V3A should be considered as part of the motion processing machinery of the visual cortex, in both human and non-human primates.Significance statementAlthough area V3A is frequently the target of anatomy and imaging studies, little is known about its functional role in processing visual stimuli. Its contribution to motion processing has been particularly unclear, with different studies yielding different conclusions. We report a detailed study of direction selectivity in V3A. Our results show that single V3A neurons are, on average, as capable of representing motion direction as are neurons in well-known structures like MT. Moreover, we identify a possible specialization for V3A neurons in representing complex optic flow, which has previously been thought to emerge in higher-order brain regions. Thus it appears that V3A is well-suited to a functional role in motion processing.


NeuroImage ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 84 ◽  
pp. 420-427 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bianca M. van Kemenade ◽  
Kiley Seymour ◽  
Evelin Wacker ◽  
Bernhard Spitzer ◽  
Felix Blankenburg ◽  
...  

2008 ◽  
Vol 99 (5) ◽  
pp. 2558-2576
Author(s):  
Mario Ruiz-Ruiz ◽  
Julio C. Martinez-Trujillo

Previous studies have demonstrated that human subjects update the location of visual targets for saccades after head and body movements and in the absence of visual feedback. This phenomenon is known as spatial updating. Here we investigated whether a similar mechanism exists for the perception of motion direction. We recorded eye positions in three dimensions and behavioral responses in seven subjects during a motion task in two different conditions: when the subject's head remained stationary and when subjects rotated their heads around an anteroposterior axis (head tilt). We demonstrated that after head-tilt subjects updated the direction of saccades made in the perceived stimulus direction (direction of motion updating), the amount of updating varied across subjects and stimulus directions, the amount of motion direction updating was highly correlated with the amount of spatial updating during a memory-guided saccade task, subjects updated the stimulus direction during a two-alternative forced-choice direction discrimination task in the absence of saccadic eye movements (perceptual updating), perceptual updating was more accurate than motion direction updating involving saccades, and subjects updated motion direction similarly during active and passive head rotation. These results demonstrate the existence of an updating mechanism for the perception of motion direction in the human brain that operates during active and passive head rotations and that resembles the one of spatial updating. Such a mechanism operates during different tasks involving different motor and perceptual skills (saccade and motion direction discrimination) with different degrees of accuracy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 335-362
Author(s):  
Tatiana Pasternak ◽  
Duje Tadin

Psychophysical and neurophysiological studies of responses to visual motion have converged on a consistent set of general principles that characterize visual processing of motion information. Both types of approaches have shown that the direction and speed of target motion are among the most important encoded stimulus properties, revealing many parallels between psychophysical and physiological responses to motion. Motivated by these parallels, this review focuses largely on more direct links between the key feature of the neuronal response to motion, direction selectivity, and its utilization in memory-guided perceptual decisions. These links were established during neuronal recordings in monkeys performing direction discriminations, but also by examining perceptual effects of widespread elimination of cortical direction selectivity produced by motion deprivation during development. Other approaches, such as microstimulation and lesions, have documented the importance of direction-selective activity in the areas that are active during memory-guided direction comparisons, area MT and the prefrontal cortex, revealing their likely interactions during behavioral tasks.


i-Perception ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 204166952093732
Author(s):  
Masahiko Terao ◽  
Shin’ya Nishida

Many studies have investigated various effects of smooth pursuit on visual motion processing, especially the effects related to the additional retinal shifts produced by eye movement. In this article, we show that the perception of apparent motion during smooth pursuit is determined by the interelement proximity in retinal coordinates and also by the proximity in objective world coordinates. In Experiment 1, we investigated the perceived direction of the two-frame apparent motion of a square-wave grating with various displacement sizes under fixation and pursuit viewing conditions. The retinal and objective displacements between the two frames agreed with each other under the fixation condition. However, the displacements differed by 180 degrees in terms of phase shift, under the pursuit condition. The proportions of the reported motion direction between the two viewing conditions did not coincide when they were plotted as a function of either the retinal displacement or of the objective displacement; however, they did coincide when plotted as a function of a mixture of the two. The result from Experiment 2 showed that the perceived jump size of the apparent motion was also dependent on both retinal and objective displacements. Our findings suggest that the detection of the apparent motion during smooth pursuit considers the retinal proximity and also the objective proximity. This mechanism may assist with the selection of a motion path that is more likely to occur in the real world and, therefore, be useful for ensuring perceptual stability during smooth pursuit.


2001 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 1243-1253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajesh P. N. Rao ◽  
David M. Eagleman ◽  
Terrence J. Sejnowski

When a flash is aligned with a moving object, subjects perceive the flash to lag behind the moving object. Two different models have been proposed to explain this “flash-lag” effect. In the motion extrapolation model, the visual system extrapolates the location of the moving object to counteract neural propagation delays, whereas in the latency difference model, it is hypothesized that moving objects are processed and perceived more quickly than flashed objects. However, recent psychophysical experiments suggest that neither of these interpretations is feasible (Eagleman & Sejnowski, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c), hypothesizing instead that the visual system uses data from the future of an event before committing to an interpretation. We formalize this idea in terms of the statistical framework of optimal smoothing and show that a model based on smoothing accounts for the shape of psychometric curves from a flash-lag experiment involving random reversals of motion direction. The smoothing model demonstrates how the visual system may enhance perceptual accuracy by relying not only on data from the past but also on data collected from the immediate future of an event.


Science ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 349 (6243) ◽  
pp. 70-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Wertz ◽  
Stuart Trenholm ◽  
Keisuke Yonehara ◽  
Daniel Hillier ◽  
Zoltan Raics ◽  
...  

Individual cortical neurons can selectively respond to specific environmental features, such as visual motion or faces. How this relates to the selectivity of the presynaptic network across cortical layers remains unclear. We used single-cell–initiated, monosynaptically restricted retrograde transsynaptic tracing with rabies viruses expressing GCaMP6s to image, in vivo, the visual motion–evoked activity of individual layer 2/3 pyramidal neurons and their presynaptic networks across layers in mouse primary visual cortex. Neurons within each layer exhibited similar motion direction preferences, forming layer-specific functional modules. In one-third of the networks, the layer modules were locked to the direction preference of the postsynaptic neuron, whereas for other networks the direction preference varied by layer. Thus, there exist feature-locked and feature-variant cortical networks.


2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (11) ◽  
pp. 2652-2668 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florian Raudies ◽  
Rick O. Gilmore

Visual motion direction ambiguities due to edge-aperture interaction might be resolved by speed priors, but scant empirical data support this hypothesis. We measured optic flow and gaze positions of walking mothers and the infants they carried. Empirically derived motion priors for infants are vertically elongated and shifted upward relative to mothers. Skewed normal distributions fitted to estimated retinal speeds peak at values above 20[Formula: see text]/sec.


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