PubMed · 13511799
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E BAUMGARDT. 1958-01-27. [The absolute visual threshold is only a differential threshold].. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/13511799/
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There is an ongoing debate on whether binocular rivalry involves competition among monocular cells or binocular cells. We investigated this issue psychophysically with two specially designed test stimuli. One test stimulus contained monocular motion signals but greatly reduced binocular motion signals, while the other contained binocular motion signals but no monocular motion signals. For comparison, we also employed a normal rivalrous control containing both monocular and binocular motion signals, and a non-rivalrous flicker-noise control with neither monocular nor binocular motion signals. We found that binocular rivalry for the two test stimuli was significantly reduced compared with the normal rivalrous control, but not completely eliminated compared with the non-rivalrous control. Therefore, both monocular and binocular motion signals appear to contribute to motion rivalry, suggesting that motion rivalry must involve competition among both monocular and binocular cells.
Previous research has shown that a field of random dots in which each dot alternates between a slow and a fast speed, can give rise to the percept of two superimposed sheets of moving dots when the alternations are out of phase or asynchronous with each other [Vis. Res. 35 (1995) 1691]. Under those conditions, observers can discriminate changes in the slow speed independent of changes in the fast speed. The present study investigated whether such motion-based segregation could result when dots alternated between two different directions. Three observers viewed a variety of displays containing two directions of motion, one upward and one oblique, with the task of discriminating small trial-to-trial changes in the direction of the upward component. The oblique direction component also changed direction from trial-to-trial. The field of dots either alternated synchronously (all dots moved in the same direction and switched to the other direction simultaneously) or asynchronously. Results showed that when the dots alternated synchronously between the directions, observers' direction discrimination performance was generally poor. However, when dots switched directions asynchronously, direction discrimination was only slightly elevated in comparison to that produced by a field of dots all moving in a single direction. Additional experiments demonstrated that this performance was not due to judging the global direction of the random-dot display. Thus the visual system had to segregate the stimulus into its component directions before integrating to arrive at the motion signal to be discriminated. It is concluded that for displays comprising elements that alternate between different directions, local direction signals can be used by the human visual system to effectively segregate a display so long as both direction signals are present simultaneously.
The visual system has a duplex design to meet conflicting environmental demands: the fovea has the resolution required to process fine spatial information, but the periphery is more sensitive to temporal properties. To investigate whether the periphery's sensitivity is partly due to the speed with which information is processed, we measured the full timecourse of visual information processing by deriving joint measures of discriminability and speed, and found that speed of information processing varies with eccentricity: processing was faster when same-size stimuli appeared at 9 degrees than 4 degrees eccentricity, and this difference was attenuated when the 9 degrees stimuli were magnified to equate cortical representation size. At the same eccentricity, larger stimuli are processed more slowly. These temporal differences are greater than expected from neurophysiological constraints.