A Systems Analysis of Visual Motion Perception

Using new psychophysical methods, it recently has become possible to isolate and measure three systems of human motion perception. The first-order system responds to moving luminance patterns. The second-order system responds to moving modulations of feature types. The first-and second-order systems are primarily monocular, sensitive, and fast. A third-order system computes motion from a salience map, that is, a neural representation of visual space in which the locations of important visual features are marked. The third-order motion system is inherently binocular, insensitive, slow, but highly versatile; it computes motion from all ordinary and many exotic types of stimuli, and it is influenced by attention. This chapter describes how these systems were isolated and how the relations between them were defined. It also describes how these early motion computations fit into a larger framework of processing stages that precede and follow motion-direction processing. In order, these stages are: light adaptation, contrast-gain control, motion-direction computation, a salience field (for figure-ground resolution and attention gating), further perceptual and decision processes, and ultimately top-down cognitive control of attention. For more than one hundred years, visual motion perception has been a central problem in perceptual theory. On the one hand, motion appears to involve an early stage of pattern recognition (the "same" pattern must be located first here and then there); on the other hand, motion appears to invoke a unique perceptual experience quite different from that of pattern or shape perception. Almost from the beginning of the experimental study of motion perception, it has been evident that more than one kind of computation is involved, and there has been a plethora of dual-process motion Although there clearly is a kernel of truth underlying most of these dichotomies and theories, there were two persistent problems. It had not been possible to obtain a demonstrably pure measure of any proposed mechanism, nor had there been a clear distinction

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