Linear motion aftereffect induced by pure relative motion

Detection of relative and uniform motion

We measured the lowest velocity (velocity threshold) for discriminating motion direction in relative and uniform motion stimuli, varying the contrast and the spatial frequency of the stimulus gratings. The results showed significant differences in the effects of contrast and spatial frequency on the threshold, as well as on the absolute threshold level between the two motion conditions, except when the contrast was 1% or lower. Little effect of spatial frequency was found for uniform motion, whereas a bandpass property with a peak at approximately 5 cycles per degree was found for relative motion. It was also found that contrast had little effect on uniform motion, whereas the threshold decreased with increases in contrast up to 85% for relative motion. These differences cannot be attributed to possible differences in eye movements between the relative and the uniform motion conditions, because the spatial-frequency characteristics differed in the two conditions even when the presentation duration was short enough to prevent eye movements. The differences also cannot be attributed to detecting positional changes, because the velocity threshold was not determined by the total distance of the stimulus movements. These results suggest that there are two different motion pathways: one that specializes in relative motion and one that specializes in uniform or global motion. A simulation showed that the difference in the response functions of the two possible pathways accounts for the differences in the spatial-frequency and contrast dependency of the velocity threshold.

Adaptation to relative and uniform motion

We compared the discriminability of motion direction with a relative motion stimulus after prolonged exposure to relative or uniform motion. Experiment 1 showed that the velocity threshold for the relative motion test after relative motion exposure was higher than that after uniform motion exposure, whereas no such difference was found when we tested with a uniform motion stimulus. Experiment 2 showed that prolonged exposure to relative motion decreased the discriminability of speed differences more than exposure to uniform motion. These results suggest that the visual system's pathway for relative motion signals is different from that for uniform motion signals.

Effects of attentional modulation of a stationary surround in adaptation to motion

The effect of varying the spatial relationships between an adapt/test grating and a stationary surrounding reference grating, and their interaction with diversion of attention during adaptation, were investigated in two experiments on the movement aftereffect (MAE). In experiment 1, MAEs were found to increase as the separation between the surrounding grating and the adapt/test grating decreased, but not with the area of the adapt/test grating. Although diversion during adaptation (repeating changing digits at the fixation point) reduced MAE durations, its effects did not interact with any of the stimulus variables. In experiment 2, MAE durations increased as the outer dimensions of the reference grating were increased, and this effect did interact with diversion, so that the effects of diversion were smaller when the surround grating was larger. This suggests that diversion may be affecting the inputs to an opponent process in motion adaptation, with a smaller effect on the surrounds than on the centres of antagonistic motion-contrast detectors with large receptive fields. A third experiment showed that, although repeating the word 'zero' during adaptation reduced MAEs, this reduction was smaller than that from naming a changing sequence of digits (and not significantly different from that from simply observing the changing digits), suggesting that MAE reductions are not produced only, if at all, by putative movements of the head and eyes caused by speaking.