Abstract
To plan movements toward objects our brain must recognize whether retinal displacement is due to self‐motion and/or to object‐motion. Here, we aimed to test whether motion areas are able to segregate these types of motion. We combined an event‐related functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment, brain mapping techniques, and wide‐field stimulation to study the responsivity of motion‐sensitive areas to pure and combined self‐ and object‐motion conditions during virtual movies of a train running within a realistic landscape. We observed a selective response in MT to the pure object‐motion condition, and in medial (PEc, pCi, CSv, and CMA) and lateral (PIC and LOR) areas to the pure self‐motion condition. Some other regions (like V6) responded more to complex visual stimulation where both object‐ and self‐motion were present. Among all, we found that some motion regions (V3A, LOR, MT, V6, and IPSmot) could extract object‐motion information from the overall motion, recognizing the real movement of the train even when the images remain still (on the screen), or moved, because of self‐movements. We propose that these motion areas might be good candidates for the “flow parsing mechanism,” that is the capability to extract object‐motion information from retinal motion signals by subtracting out the optic flow components.
Highlights
Detection of moving objects or living entities in our surroundings is among the most fundamental abilities of the visual system
This region partially overlaps with the superior part of the frontal eye fields (FEF) region, still located on the precentral sulcus but more inferiorly
Here we show that middle superior temporal area (MST)+ responds well to both self- and object-motion, we found that MST+ does not discriminate between Joint and Onboard and it does not seem to have a role in the flow parsing
Summary
Detection of moving objects or living entities in our surroundings is among the most fundamental abilities of the visual system. A shift of the retinal image of an object may occur when the object moves, and when we move within an otherwise static environment, or when we move our eyes or head. Our motion perception consists of much more than the detection of retinal shifts and involves recognizing whether retinal shifts are due to true object displacements or generated by our own movements, or by some combination of the two.
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