Deficits and Recovery of First-Order and Second-Order Motion Perception in Patients with Unilateral Posterior Parietal Lesions

Abstract

Our aim was to test whether unilateral posterior parietal lesions degrade first-order and second-order motion differentially, and to investigate the time course of any potential recovery. We tested ten patients with circumscribed parietal lesions. Thresholds were measured for the discrimination of the direction of motion of stimuli presented 5.5° peripherally in the ipsilesional and contralesional visual hemifields. Subjects had to indicate whether a rectangular region (1.6 deg × 3 deg) embedded in dynamic random noise background moved up or down. The region contained moving (signal) and flickering (background) dots and moved for 1 s at 2.36 deg s−1. Signal dots were either (a) coherently moving in the same direction as the region (first-order), (b) stationary (second-order), or (c) coherently moving in the opposite direction (theta). Thresholds were defined as percentage of signal dots within the region yielding 75% correct responses. All patients had higher thresholds for second-order than for first-order motion. When contralesional and ipsilesional thresholds were compared, three patients showed proportional threshold elevations for all three types of motion stimuli in the contralesional hemifield. Two of these three patients were tested again five months later. Both showed considerable recovery: in one patient, the contralesional deficit was no longer present; in the other, it was reduced by about half. None of our patients had lesions affecting first-order or second-order motion differentially; lesions always affected first-order and second-order motion similarly. Owing to recovery, these deficits might be detectable only for a short time.