scholarly journals Top-down Influence of Global Motion Patterns on Local Motion Patterns

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (10) ◽  
pp. 165a
Author(s):  
Darwin Romulus ◽  
Sang W Hong ◽  
Howard Hock
2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (5) ◽  
pp. 395-405
Author(s):  
Luca Battaglini ◽  
Federica Mena ◽  
Clara Casco

Background: To study motion perception, a stimulus consisting of a field of small, moving dots is often used. Generally, some of the dots coherently move in the same direction (signal) while the rest move randomly (noise). A percept of global coherent motion (CM) results when many different local motion signals are combined. CM computation is a complex process that requires the integrity of the middle-temporal area (MT/V5) and there is evidence that increasing the number of dots presented in the stimulus makes such computation more efficient. Objective: In this study, we explored whether anodal direct current stimulation (tDCS) over MT/V5 would increase individual performance in a CM task at a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR, i.e. low percentage of coherent dots) and with a target consisting of a large number of moving dots (high dot numerosity, e.g. >250 dots) with respect to low dot numerosity (<60 dots), indicating that tDCS favour the integration of local motion signal into a single global percept (global motion). Method: Participants were asked to perform a CM detection task (two-interval forced-choice, 2IFC) while they received anodal, cathodal, or sham stimulation on three different days. Results: Our findings showed no effect of cathodal tDCS with respect to the sham condition. Instead, anodal tDCS improves performance, but mostly when dot numerosity is high (>400 dots) to promote efficient global motion processing. Conclusions: The present study suggests that tDCS may be used under appropriate stimulus conditions (low SNR and high dot numerosity) to boost the global motion processing efficiency, and may be useful to empower clinical protocols to treat visual deficits.


Neuron ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 100 (1) ◽  
pp. 229-243.e3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin L. Barnhart ◽  
Irving E. Wang ◽  
Huayi Wei ◽  
Claude Desplan ◽  
Thomas R. Clandinin

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 1048-1048
Author(s):  
Y. Nakajima ◽  
T. Sato

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 190114
Author(s):  
William Curran ◽  
Lee Beattie ◽  
Delfina Bilello ◽  
Laura A. Coulter ◽  
Jade A. Currie ◽  
...  

Prior experience influences visual perception. For example, extended viewing of a moving stimulus results in the misperception of a subsequent stimulus's motion direction—the direction after-effect (DAE). There has been an ongoing debate regarding the locus of the neural mechanisms underlying the DAE. We know the mechanisms are cortical, but there is uncertainty about where in the visual cortex they are located—at relatively early local motion processing stages, or at later global motion stages. We used a unikinetic plaid as an adapting stimulus, then measured the DAE experienced with a drifting random dot test stimulus. A unikinetic plaid comprises a static grating superimposed on a drifting grating of a different orientation. Observers cannot see the true motion direction of the moving component; instead they see pattern motion running parallel to the static component. The pattern motion of unikinetic plaids is encoded at the global processing level—specifically, in cortical areas MT and MST—and the local motion component is encoded earlier. We measured the direction after-effect as a function of the plaid's local and pattern motion directions. The DAE was induced by the plaid's pattern motion, but not by its component motion. This points to the neural mechanisms underlying the DAE being located at the global motion processing level, and no earlier than area MT.


2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 239-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
SOPHIE M. WUERGER ◽  
ALEXA RUPPERTSBERG ◽  
STEPHANIE MALEK ◽  
MARCO BERTAMINI ◽  
JASNA MARTINOVIC

AbstractGlobal motion integration mechanisms can utilize signals defined by purely chromatic information. Is global motion integration sensitive to the polarity of such color signals? To answer this question, we employed isoluminant random dot kinematograms (RDKs) that contain a single chromatic contrast polarity or two different polarities. Single-polarity RDKs consisted of local motion signals with either a positive or a negative S or L–M component, while in the different-polarity RDKs, half the dots had a positive S or L–M component, and the other half had a negative S or L–M component. In all RDKs, the polarity and the motion direction of the local signals were uncorrelated. Observers discriminated between 50% coherent motion and random motion, and contrast thresholds were obtained for 81% correct responses. Contrast thresholds were obtained for three different dot densities (50, 100, and 200 dots). We report two main findings: (1) dependence on dot density is similar for both contrast polarities (+S vs. −S, +LM vs. −LM) but slightly steeper for S in comparison to LM and (2) thresholds for different-polarity RDKs are significantly higher than for single-polarity RDKs, which is inconsistent with a polarity-blind integration mechanism. We conclude that early motion integration mechanisms are sensitive to the polarity of the local motion signals and do not automatically integrate information across different polarities.


2009 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Szonya Durant ◽  
Johannes M Zanker

Illusory position shifts induced by motion suggest that motion processing can interfere with perceived position. This may be because accurate position representation is lost during successive visual processing steps. We found that complex motion patterns, which can only be extracted at a global level by pooling and segmenting local motion signals and integrating over time, can influence perceived position. We used motion-defined Gabor patterns containing motion-defined boundaries, which themselves moved over time. This ‘motion-defined motion’ induced position biases of up to 0.5°, much larger than has been found with luminance-defined motion. The size of the shift correlated with how detectable the motion-defined motion direction was, suggesting that the amount of bias increased with the magnitude of this complex directional signal. However, positional shifts did occur even when participants were not aware of the direction of the motion-defined motion. The size of the perceptual position shift was greatly reduced when the position judgement was made relative to the location of a static luminance-defined square, but not eliminated. These results suggest that motion-induced position shifts are a result of general mechanisms matching dynamic object properties with spatial location.


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