Modeling human motion perception. I. Classical stimuli.

Abstract

Motion perception is one of the most prominent tasks of the visual system and therefore has been extensively investigated both experimentally and theoretically. A classical model describing the mechanism of motion detection originally developed in the context of insect orientation behavior, the elementary motion detector (EMD) of the correlation type, turned out to be very powerful in explaining many basic aspects of human motion perception. For more complex visual tasks, like the discrimination of a figure from its background by relative motion, on the other hand, further processing of motion information is required. In the first part of this review it will be illustrated by means of a few examples, what kind of motion information can be derived from the mere correlation-type model, and what perceptual phenomena can be accounted for by the EMD. In the second part, more recently developed stimuli will be introduced to answer the question what further processing steps, or more sophisticated mechanisms than the EMD, have to be assumed in order to understand "higher" aspects of human motion perception.