Effect of contrast on the perception of direction of a moving pattern

Abstract

A series of experiments examining the effect of contrast on the perception of moving plaids was performed to test the hypothesis that the human visual system determines the direction of a moving plaid in a two-staged process: decomposition into component motion followed by application of the intersection-of-contraints rule. Although there is recent evidence that the first tenet of the hypothesis is correct, i.e., that plaid motion is initially decomposed into the motion of the individual grating components, the nature of the second-stage combination rule has not yet been established. It was found that when the gratings within the plaid are of different contrast the preceived direction is not predicted by the intersection-of-constraints rule. There is a strong (up to 20 deg) bias in the direction of the higher-constrast grating. A revised model, which incorporates a contrast-dependent weighting of perceived grating speed as observed for one-dimensional patterns, can quantitatively predict most of the results. The results are then discussed in the context of various models of human visual motion processing and of physiological responses of neurons in the primate visual system