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Galvanic vestibular stimulation modifies vection paths in healthy subjects.

The present study aimed at determining whether vestibular inputs contribute to the perception of the direction of self-motion. This question was approached by investigating the effects of binaural bipolar galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) on visually induced self-motion (i.e., vection) in healthy subjects. Stationary seated subjects were submitted to optokinetic stimulation inducing either forward or upward linear vection. While perceiving vection, they were administered trapezoidal GVS of different intensities and ramp durations. Subjects indicated the shape and direction of their perceived self-motion path throughout the experiment by a joystick, and after each trial by the manipulation of a 3D mannequin. Results show that: 1) GVS induced alterations of the path of vection; 2) these alterations occurred more often after GVS onset than after GVS offset; 3) the occurrence of vection path alterations after GVS onset depended on the intensity of GVS but not on the steepness of the GVS variation; 4) the vection path deviated laterally according to either an oblique or a curved path; and 5) the vection path deviated toward the cathode side after GVS onset. It is the first time that vestibular information, already known to contribute to the induction of vection, is shown to modify self-motion perception during the course of vection.

Adolescent↗

Neural dynamics of motion processing and speed discrimination.

A neural network model of visual motion perception and speed discrimination is presented. The model shows how a distributed population code of speed tuning, that realizes a size-speed correlation, can be derived from the simplest mechanisms whereby activations of multiple spatially short-range filters of different size are transformed into speed-turned cell responses. These mechanisms use transient cell responses to moving stimuli, output thresholds that covary with filter size, and competition. These mechanisms are proposed to occur in the V1-->MT cortical processing stream. The model reproduces empirically derived speed discrimination curves and simulates data showing how visual speed perception and discrimination can be affected by stimulus contrast, duration, dot density and spatial frequency. Model motion mechanisms are analogous to mechanisms that have been used to model 3-D form and figure-ground perception. The model forms the front end of a larger motion processing system that has been used to simulate how global motion capture occurs, and how spatial attention is drawn to moving forms. It provides a computational foundation for an emerging neural theory of 3-D form and motion perception.

Form Perception↗

Reduced neuronal activity in the V5 complex underlies smooth-pursuit deficit in schizophrenia: evidence from an fMRI study.

Smooth-pursuit eye movements are the essential tool for a clear and stable visual perception of our environment by matching eye velocity to the velocity of moving objects. However, in about 50% of schizophrenic patients, this ability is disturbed. To reveal the cortical mechanisms that underlie this deficit, eye velocity-related neuronal activity was analyzed by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Blocks of constant velocity ramps (10 degrees/s) were presented to 17 patients with schizophrenia and 16 matched controls while assessing smooth-pursuit velocity (SPV) during scanning sessions. Using random-effects analysis, the parametric modulation of brain hemodynamic responses related to SPV was compared between both groups. In schizophrenic patients, reduced SPV was significantly correlated with a focal decrease of the hemodynamic response in the V5 complex (t = 4.21, P(FWE-corrected) = 0.005). Our results provide direct evidence for reduced neuronal activity in V5 as one major factor underlying abnormal SPV in schizophrenia and suggest impaired motion perception. They confirm hypotheses about a V5 deficit derived from psychophysiological studies with schizophrenic patients in which deficient motion perception (especially velocity discrimination) was associated with impaired smooth-pursuit performance.

Adult↗

[Visual prevention from motion sickness in cars].

The differential effects of vision on motion sickness in cars were tested under real road conditions using linear accelerations, in order to confirm earlier laboratory results on visual modulation of vestibular nausea induced by angular accelerations of the body. The 18 voluntary subjects were exposed to repetitive braking maneuvers (linear accelerations: 0.1-1.2 g) on a highway. The simultaneous visual stimulus conditions for the 3 separate days were: I) eyes open, visual control of car motion; II) eyes closed; III) eyes open, artificial stationary visual field (reading). The severity of motion sickness (magnitude estimation 1-10) was a function of the visual stimulus condition with significant differences among these conditions: I) moderate nausea (less than 1) with adequate visual motion perception; II) medium nausea (approximately equal to 2) with eyes closed and somatosensory-vestibular excitation only; III) strong nausea (greater than 5) with conflicting sensory input, when vestibular acceleration is in disagreement with the visual information of no movement. Providing ample peripheral vision of the relatively moving surround is the best strategy to alleviate car sickness.

Acceleration↗

Saccadic suppression of low-level motion.

We measured the detection of motion before, during and after a saccade to explore the effects of a saccade on motion perception. To isolate the low-level motion mechanism, the stimulus was a random-dot field displaced by small distance (0.3 deg) within a stationary frame. The displacement signaled motion clearly if eyes were fixated, but for the displacement during a saccade, motion was not detected whether the displacement was defined in spatial coordinates (expt 1) or in retinal coordinates (expt 2). Since motion could be seen with ISIs longer than the duration of a saccade (expt 3), the suppression cannot be attributed to visual loss during the saccade. Experiment 3 also showed that motion was never seen for a displacement that occurred during a saccade, even though the random dots were replaced by a uniform field during the eye movement thereby eliminating any masking effect of the sweep of the image across the retina. The purpose of the saccadic suppression of motion may be to block out unreliable motion signals that would be produced by a saccade. Since saccade distances are very often greater than the maximum distance over which the low-level motion mechanism can produce accurate direction discrimination for fine textures, motion signals would generally indicate false directions if they were not suppressed.

Eye Movements↗

Perceptual organization as nested control.

It is argued here that perceptual organization is the structuring of environmental stimuli into nested structures of control. This view is derived from our proposal that the perceptual system forces any stimulus set to have the algebraic structure G of a machine, and that G is given a specific factorization sequence, G = G1 X G2 X ... X Gn, induced by dynamical systems criteria which the organism imposes on the environment. An investigation into these factorization sequences reveals that any such sequence is split into two subsequences, one structuring the way in which the stimulus set can change under external action, and the other describing the way in which the set is perceived as internally generated. An examination of the nested control structure of the latter yields a theory of grouping. The external and internal sequences are shown to be strongly related to each other in that the symmetry axes of the internal sequence are eigenspaces of the most stable subgroup factors of the external sequence. It is claimed that cartesian reference frames are subsequences of the full sequences. Using these principles, a unified theory is offered of several apparently quite separate perceptual areas; e.g. Marr-Nishihara shape perception, gestalt grouping, the orientation-and-form problem, and motion perception. The final claim is that planning hierarchies have the same dynamically-structured algebraic sequences and therefore that the study of perceptual organization should, in a very deep sense, be formally equivalent to the study of planning.

Cognition↗

Single unit activity and visual perception of motion.

Extracellular recordings were carried out in the primary visual cortex of behaving macaque monkeys. Neurons were activated by moving a visual stimulus across their receptive fields during steady fixation and by moving their receptive fields (by visual tracking) at the same velocity across a stationary visual stimulus. Out of a total number of 123 cells studied, 111 were activated by the visual stimulation both during fixation and tracking. The remaining 12 cells showed good response during fixation and very weakened response during tracking. Our results show that a small percentage of striate neurons in macaque monkey could discriminate between the real motion of an object in the visual world and the self-induced displacement of its retinal image.

Animals↗

Direction-specific motion blindness induced by focal stimulation of human extrastriate cortex.

Motion blindness (MB) or akinetopsia is the selective disturbance of visual motion perception while other features of the visual scene such as colour and shape are normally perceived. Chronic and transient forms of MB are characterized by a global deficit of direction discrimination (pandirectional), which is generally assumed to result from damage to, or interference with, the motion complex MT+/V5. However, the most characteristic feature of primate MT-neurons is not their motion specificity, but their preference for one direction of motion (direction specificity). Here, we report that focal electrical stimulation in the human posterior temporal lobe selectively impaired the perception of motion in one direction while the perception of motion in other directions was completely normal (unidirectional MB). In addition, the direction of MB was found to depend on the brain area stimulated. It is argued that direction specificity for visual motion is not only represented at the single neuron level, but also in much larger cortical units.

Adult↗

Contribution of bottom-up and top-down motion processes to perceived position.

Perceived position depends on many factors, including motion present in a visual scene. Convincing evidence shows that high-level motion perception--which is driven by top-down processes such as attentional tracking or inferred motion--can influence the perceived position of an object. Is high-level motion sufficient to influence perceived position, and is attention to or awareness of motion direction necessary to displace objects' perceived positions? Consistent with previous reports, the first experiment revealed that the perception of motion, even when no physical motion was present, was sufficient to shift perceived position. A second experiment showed that when subjects were unable to identify the direction of a physically present motion stimulus, the apparent locations of other objects were still influenced. Thus, motion influences perceived position by at least two distinct processes. The first involves a passive, preattentive mechanism that does not depend on perceptual awareness; the second, a top-down process that depends on the perceptual awareness of motion direction. Each contributes to perceived position, but independently of the other.

Attention↗

Local direction of edge motion causes and abolishes the barberpole illusion.

The perceived direction of motion of a one-dimensional grating is measured in straight-edged rectangular and indented rectangular apertures. It is shown that the perceived direction of motion of the pattern is largely determined by the directions of motion at the edges, rather than by the aspect ratio or global shape of the aperture. The edge motion vectors appear to be calculated at a remarkably local scale. The barberpole illusion is abolished when indentation size equals or exceeds one-quarter of the grating period. This critical size is scale invariant with grating period and corresponds well with a quadrature model of motion perception.

Humans↗

Moving from spatially segregated to transparent motion: A modelling approach.

Motion transparency, in which patterns of moving elements group together to give the impression of lacy overlapping surfaces, provides an important challenge to models of motion perception. It has been suggested that we perceive transparent motion when the shape of the velocity histogram of the stimulus is bimodal. To investigate this further, random-dot kinematogram motion sequences were created to simulate segregated (perceptually spatially separated) and transparent (perceptually overlapping) motion. The motion sequences were analysed using the multi-channel gradient model (McGM) to obtain the speed and direction at every pixel of each frame of the motion sequences. The velocity histograms obtained were found to be quantitatively similar and all were bimodal. However, the spatial and temporal properties of the velocity field differed between segregated and transparent stimuli. Transparent stimuli produced patches of rightward and leftward motion that varied in location over time. This demonstrates that we can successfully differentiate between these two types of motion on the basis of the time varying local velocity field. However, the percept of motion transparency cannot be based simply on the presence of a bimodal velocity histogram.

Models, Theoretical↗

Does perception of biological motion rely on specific brain regions?

Perception of biological motions plays a major adaptive role in identifying, interpreting, and predicting the actions of others. It may therefore be hypothesized that the perception of biological motions is subserved by a specific neural network. Here we used fMRI to verify this hypothesis. In a group of 10 healthy volunteers, we explored the hemodynamic responses to seven types of visual motion displays: drifting random dots, random dot cube, random dot cube with masking elements, upright point-light walker, inverted point-light walker, upright point-light walker display with masking elements, and inverted point-light walker display with masking elements. A gradient in activation was observed in the occipitotemporal junction. The responses to rigid motion were localized posteriorly to those responses elicited by nonrigid motions. Our results demonstrate that in addition to the posterior portion of superior temporal sulcus, the left intraparietal cortex is involved in the perception of nonrigid biological motions.

Adult↗

Higher cortical visual function.

Higher cortical visual function continues to be explored with both lesion and functional imaging studies. Studies with functional MRI confirm that the fusiform gyri are involved in color and face perception, and show multiple regions participating in motion perception, including V5, V3A, and a new area, the kinetic occipital region. There were numerous blindsight reports, including studies of spatial summation and "inhibition of return," and a refutation of the argument that blindsight is merely a "criterion shift." However, other studies failed to find blindsight-like ocular motor responses to moving stimuli. Occipitotemporal lesions were found to cause defects in perception of both first- and second-order motion. The psychophysical impairments of the motion-blind patient LM were shown to be similar to those of monkeys with V5 ablations, suggesting a close homology between this monkey visual area and the human motion area in the lateral occipitotemporal cortex.

Animals↗

Two motion systems with common and separate pathways for color and luminance.

We present psychological experiments that reveal two motion systems, a specific and an unspecific one. The specific system prevails at medium to high temporal frequencies. It comprises at least two separate motion pathways that are selective for color and for luminance and that do not interact until after the motion signal is extracted separately in each. By contrast, the unspecific system prevails at low temporal frequencies and it combines color and luminance signals at an earlier stage, before motion extraction. The successful implementation of an efficient and accurate technique for assessing equiluminance corroborates further the main findings. These results offer a general framework for understanding the nature of interactions between color and luminance signals in motion perception and suggest that previously proposed dichotomies in motion processing may be encompassed by the specific/unspecific dichotomy proposed here.

Color Perception↗

Seeing invisible motion: a human FMRI study.

A common view about visual consciousness is that it could arise when and where activity reaches some higher level of processing along the cortical hierarchy. Reports showing that activity in striate cortex can be dissociated from awareness , whereas the latter modulates activity in higher areas , point in this direction. In the specific case of visual motion, a central, "perceptual" role has been assigned to area V5: several human and monkey studies have shown V5 activity to correlate with the motion percept. Here we show that activity in this and other higher cortical areas can be also dissociated from perception and follow the physical stimulus instead. The motion information in a peripheral grating modulated fMRI responses, despite being invisible to human volunteers: under crowding conditions , areas V3A, V5, and parietal cortex still showed increased activity when the grating was moving compared to when it was flickering. We conclude that stimulus-specific activation of higher cortical areas does not necessarily result in awareness of the underlying stimulus.

Adult↗

Sustained deviation of gaze direction can affect "inverted vection" induced by the foreground motion.

A slowly moving foreground with an orthogonally moving background can induce self-motion perception in the same direction as the foreground motion (inverted vection; [Vision Research 40 (2000) 2915]). In the present study, we investigate the effect of sustained gaze deviation on inverted vection. We hypothesized that gaze deviation affects eye-movement information registered in the perceptual system, which might be a primary factor for causing inverted vection. The experiment revealed that strength of inverted vection decreases with observer's gaze deviation in the same direction as the foreground motion, while it increases with the deviation in the opposite direction to the foreground. These results support our hypothesis and suggest that inverted vection is affected by eye-movement information.

Adult↗

Neural correlates of implied motion.

Current views of the visual system assume that the primate brain analyses form and motion along largely independent pathways; they provide no insight into why form is sometimes interpreted as motion. In a series of psychophysical and electrophysiological experiments in humans and macaques, here we show that some form information is processed in the prototypical motion areas of the superior temporal sulcus (STS). First, we show that STS cells respond to dynamic Glass patterns, which contain no coherent motion but suggest a path of motion. Second, we show that when motion signals conflict with form signals suggesting a different path of motion, both humans and monkeys perceive motion in a compromised direction. This compromise also has a correlate in the responses of STS cells, which alter their direction preferences in the presence of conflicting implied motion information. We conclude that cells in the prototypical motion areas in the dorsal visual cortex process form that implies motion. Estimating motion by combining motion cues with form cues may be a strategy to deal with the complexities of motion perception in our natural environment.

Animals↗

Neurons compute internal models of the physical laws of motion.

A critical step in self-motion perception and spatial awareness is the integration of motion cues from multiple sensory organs that individually do not provide an accurate representation of the physical world. One of the best-studied sensory ambiguities is found in visual processing, and arises because of the inherent uncertainty in detecting the motion direction of an untextured contour moving within a small aperture. A similar sensory ambiguity arises in identifying the actual motion associated with linear accelerations sensed by the otolith organs in the inner ear. These internal linear accelerometers respond identically during translational motion (for example, running forward) and gravitational accelerations experienced as we reorient the head relative to gravity (that is, head tilt). Using new stimulus combinations, we identify here cerebellar and brainstem motion-sensitive neurons that compute a solution to the inertial motion detection problem. We show that the firing rates of these populations of neurons reflect the computations necessary to construct an internal model representation of the physical equations of motion.

Animals↗