Spatiotemporal filtering and motion illusions

Abstract

We are perplexed by Clarke et al.’s (2013) criticisms on our recent contribution to Journal of Vision (Pooresmaeili, Cicchini, Morrone, & Burr, 2012). Our group has long championed the idea that perceptual processing of information can be anchored in a dynamic coordinate system that need not correspond to the instantaneous retinal representation. Our recent evidence shows that temporal duration (Burr, Tozzi, & Morrone, 2007; Morrone, Cicchini, & Burr, 2010), orientation (Zimmermann, Morrone, Fink, & Burr, 2013), motion (Melcher & Morrone, 2003; Turi & Burr, 2012) and saccadic error-correction (Zimmermann, Burr, & Morrone, 2011) are all processed to some extent in spatiotopic coordinates. Imaging studies reinforce these studies (d’Avossa et al., 2007; Crespi et al., 2011). Much earlier, we showed that the processing of smoothly moving objects was not anchored in instantaneous, retinotopic coordinates, but in the reference frame given by the trajectory of motion. There is an effective interpolation along the trajectory, so temporal offsets in spatially collinear stimuli causes them to appear spatially offset, corresponding to the physical reality of stimuli moving over large regions of space, behind occluders (Burr, 1979; Burr & Ross, 1979). Our explanation for this surprising effect was that it could be a direct consequence of the spatiotemporal orientation of the impulsive response of motion detectors, providing the spatiotemporal reference frame needed to account for the interactions between time and space (Burr & Ross, 1986; Burr, Ross, & Morrone, 1986; Burr & Ross, 2004; Nishida, 2004). Recently, we have applied the concept of spatiotemporal oriented receptive fields to account for ‘‘predictive remapping,’’ the ‘‘nonretinotopic’’ effects that occur on each saccadic eye-movement (Burr & Morrone, 2010; Burr & Morrone, 2012; Cicchini, Binda, Burr, & Morrone, 2012). We were most impressed by the compelling demonstrations of Herzog’s group, clearly showing that the reference frame of processing is not the instantaneous retinal position, but is flexible, depending not only on real physical motion, but on an illusory apparent motion where the stimuli do not actually move (Boi, Ogmen, Krummenacher, Otto, & Herzog, 2009). This seemed to us important, worthy of quantitative measurement and modeling, particularly to see whether these new effects may fall within the framework that so successfully explained previous demonstrations, such as spatiotemporal interpolation. It is reassuring that Clarke et al. (2013) confirm our results, albeit with some variability between subjects. But more importantly add a very nice result in showing that our simplified version of the ‘‘litmus test’’ can be enhanced by attending to the motion. This is an excellent point that we overlooked. The strength of this type of motion is well known to depend on attention (Cavanagh, 1992), and it is indeed interesting that the strength of motion-induced effects depends not only on the physical conditions, but on internal states such as attention. Perhaps attention may also provide the flexibility in choosing the most appropriate scale for analysis, which in this case would be lower, given that attention is diverted to the periphery. This would add strength to our model, and an idea worth following up,