PubMed · 7314520
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B Breitmeyer, D M Levi, R S Harwerth. 1981. Flicker masking in spatial vision.. https://doi.org/10.1016/0042-6989(81)90243-1
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The motion after-effect occurs after prolonged viewing of motion; a subsequent stationary scene is perceived as moving in the opposite direction. This illusion is thought to arise because motion is represented by the differential activities of populations of cortical neurons tuned to opposite directions; fatigue in one population leads to an imbalance that favours the opposite direction once the stimulus ceases. Following adaptation to multiple directions of motion, the after-effect is unidirectional, indicating that motion signals are integrated across all directions. Yet humans can perceive several directions of motion simultaneously. The question therefore arises as to how the visual system can perform both sharp segregation and global integration of motion signals. Here we show in computer simulations that this can occur if excitatory interactions between different directions are sharply tuned while inhibitory interactions are broadly tuned. Our model predicts that adaptation to simultaneous motion in opposite directions will lead to an orthogonal motion after-effect. This prediction was confirmed in psychophysical experiments. Thus, broadly tuned inhibitory interactions are likely to be important in the integration and segregation of motion signals. These interactions may occur in the cortical area MT, which contains motion-sensitive neurons with properties similar to those required by our model.
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Recent models of the visual system in primates suggest that the mechanisms underlying visual perception and visuomotor control are implemented in separate functional streams in the cerebral cortex. However, a little-studied perceptual illusion demonstrates that a motor-related signal representing arm position can contribute to the visual perception of size. The illusion consists of an illusory size change in an afterimage of the hand when the hand is moved towards or away from the subject. The motor signal necessary for the illusion could be specified by feedforward and/or feedback sources (i.e. efference copy and/or proprioception/kinesthesis). We investigated the nature of this signal by measuring the illusion's magnitude when subjects moved their own arm (active condition, feedforward and feedback information available), and when arm movement was under the control of the experimenter (passive condition, feedback information available). Active and passive movements produced equivalent illusory size changes in the afterimages. However, the illusion was not obtained when an after-image of subject's hand was obtained prior to movement of the other hand from a very similar location in space. This evidence shows that proprioceptive/kinesthetic feedback was sufficient to drive the illusion and suggests that a specific three-dimensional registration of proprioceptive input and the initial afterimage is necessary for the illusion to occur.