Visual processing of motion boundaries

Abstract

Psychometric functions for motion detection were measured for various spatial velocity profiles made of independently moving lines of random dots. In the first experiment, sensitivity was greater for square-wave velocity profiles than for sine waves of the same fundamental spatial frequency. Sensitivity for square waves depended on the phase of the waveform with respect to the fixation point, which precludes a characterization of the processes underlying the detection of shearing motion as a translation-invariant system. The second experiment, using velocity fields created by spatial superposition of sine waves, showed that motion boundaries facilitate detection of motion due to the steepness of the velocity gradient, and not simply because of added power at higher harmonics. In the third experiment, fluted velocity waveforms were created by subtracting the fundamental sinusoidal component from square waves, retaining sharp motion boundaries between opposing directions but removing the regions of uniform motion. Subtracting the fundamental from low-frequency square waves did not lower sensitivity to motion, indicating that sensitivity was largely determined by the presence of motion boundaries. In the final section of this article, a model is presented that can account for the data by using linear center-surround velocity mechanisms whose sizes increase with eccentricity while their sensitivity for shearing motion decreases.