Discrimination of an orientation difference in dynamic textures

Abstract

We investigated whether the response of a motion sensor was related to the specificity of sensory information (orientation and direction of motion) used to compute motion energy. This was done in two ways. First, we assessed whether orientation discrimination of a target line, which segregated by an orientation difference from a textured background, was improved with two-frame apparent motion stimulation (as compared with static presentation). Second, we investigated whether the amount of improvement (in either orientation or direction of motion discrimination) depends on a particular combination of target orientation and direction of motion (either orthogonal or parallel). We found that the percentage of correct responses in the discrimination task (a) was higher for a moving target than for a static one; (b) was higher when the target was oriented more orthogonally to motion direction than background elements; (c) was little affected by background motion and (d) decreased with frame duration in the direction of motion task whereas it was largely unaffected by frame duration in the discrimination of orientation task. These results suggest that discrimination of moving texture boundaries is based on a motion sensor tuned to a particular combination of orientation and direction of motion, which is capable of signalling the orientation of a moving target more accurately than a static sensor.