Centre-surround receptive field organization is a ubiquitous property in mammalian visual systems, presumably tailored for extracting image features that are differentially distributed over space. In visual motion, this is evident as antagonistic interactions between centre and surround regions of the receptive fields of many direction-selective neurons in visual cortex. In a series of psychophysical experiments we make the counterintuitive observation that increasing the size of a high-contrast moving pattern renders its direction of motion more difficult to perceive and reduces its effectiveness as an adaptation stimulus. We propose that this is a perceptual correlate of centre-surround antagonism, possibly within a population of neurons in the middle temporal visual area. The spatial antagonism of motion signals observed at high contrast gives way to spatial summation as contrast decreases. Evidently, integration of motion signals over space depends crucially on the visibility of those signals, thereby allowing the visual system to register motion information efficiently and adaptively.

Damage to the primary visual cortex (V1) or its immediate afferents results in a dense scotoma, termed cortical blindness (CB). CB subjects have residual visual abilities, or blindsight, which allow them to detect and sometimes discriminate stimuli with high temporal and low spatial frequency content. Recent work showed that with training, discriminations in the blind field can become more reliable, and even reach consciousness. However, the narrow spatiotemporal bandwidth of blindsight limits its functional usefulness in everyday vision. Here, we asked whether visual training can induce recovery outside the spatiotemporal bandwidth of blindsight. Specifically, could human CB subjects learn to discriminate static, nonflickering stimuli? Can such learning transfer to untrained stimuli and tasks, and does double training with moving and static stimuli provide additional advantages relative to static training alone? We found CB subjects capable of relearning static orientation discriminations following single as well as double training. However, double training with complex, moving stimuli in a separate location was necessary to recover complex motion thresholds at locations trained with static stimuli. Subjects trained on static stimuli alone could only discriminate simple motion. Finally, both groups had approximately equivalent, incomplete recovery of fine orientation and direction discrimination thresholds, as well as contrast sensitivity. These results support two conclusions: (1) from a practical perspective, complex moving stimuli and double training may be superior training tools for inducing visual recovery in CB, and (2) the cortically blind visual system can relearn to perform a wider range of visual discriminations than predicted by blindsight alone.

Schizophrenia is often accompanied by a range of visual perception deficits, with many involving impairments in motion perception. The presence of perceptual abnormalities may impair neural processes that depend on normal visual analysis, which in turn may affect overall functioning in dynamic visual environments. Here, we examine the integrity of suppressive center-surround mechanisms in motion perception of schizophrenic patients. Center-surround suppression has been implicated in a range of visual functions, including figureground segregation and pursuit eye movements, visual functions that are impaired in schizophrenia. In control subjects, evidence of center-surround suppression is found in a reduced ability to perceive motion of a high-contrast stimulus as its size increases. This counterintuitive finding is likely a perceptual correlate of center-surround mechanisms in cortical area MT. We now show that schizophrenic patients exhibit abnormally weak center-surround suppression in motion, an abnormality that is most pronounced in patients with severe negative symptoms. Interestingly, patients with the weakest surround suppression outperformed control subjects in motion discriminations of large high-contrast stimuli. This enhanced motion perception of large high-contrast stimuli is consistent with an MT abnormality in schizophrenia and has a potential to disrupt smooth pursuit eye movements and other visual functions that depend on unimpaired center-surround interactions in motion.

Atypical perceptual processing in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is well documented. Additionally, growing evidence supports the hypothesis that an excitatory/inhibitory neurochemical imbalance might underlie ASD. Here, we investigated putative behavioral consequences of the excitatory/inhibitory imbalance in the context of visual motion perception. As stimulus size increases, typical observers exhibit marked impairments in perceiving motion of high-contrast stimuli. This result, termed spatial suppression, is believed to reflect inhibitory motion processing mechanisms. Motion processing is also affected by gain control—an inhibitory mechanism that underlies saturation of neural responses at high contrast. Motivated by these behavioral correlates of inhibitory function, we investigated motion perception in human children with ASD (N=20) and typical development (N=26). At high contrast, both groups exhibited similar impairments in motion perception with increasing stimulus size, revealing no apparent differences in spatial suppression. However, there was a substantial enhancement of motion perception in ASD: children with ASD exhibited a consistent two-fold improvement in perceiving motion. Hypothesizing this enhancement might indicate abnormal weakening of response gain control, we repeated our measurements at low contrast, where the effects of gain control should be negligible. At low contrast, we indeed found no group differences in motion discrimination thresholds. These low-contrast results, however, revealed weaker spatial suppression in ASD, suggesting the possibility that gain control abnormalities in ASD might have masked spatial suppression differences at high contrast. Overall, we report a pattern of motion perception abnormalities in ASD that includes substantial enhancements at high contrast and is consistent with an underlying excitatory/inhibitory imbalance.

We measured visual-adaptation strength under variations in visual awareness by manipulating phenomenal invisibility of adapting stimuli using binocular rivalry and visual crowding. Results showed that the threshold-elevation aftereffect and the translational motion aftereffect were reduced substantially during binocular rivalry and crowding. Importantly, aftereffect reduction was correlated with the proportion of time that the adapting stimulus was removed from visual awareness. These findings indicate that the neural events that underlie both rivalry and crowding are inaugurated at an early stage of visual processing, because both the threshold-elevation aftereffect and translational motion aftereffect arise, at least in part, from adaptation at the earliest stages of cortical processing. Also, our findings make it necessary to reinterpret previous studies whose results were construed as psychophysical evidence against the direct role of neurons in the primary visual cortex in visual awareness. binocular rivalry ͉ crowding ͉ vision V isual adaptation has been dubbed the psychologist's microelectrode (1) because the resulting visual aftereffects presumably reveal response properties of neural mechanisms that are activated by adapting stimuli. Also, measuring visual adaptation under visual conditions that render the adapting stimulus invisible allows one to draw inferences about the neural concomitants of the conditions that produce stimulus invisibility. Specifically, a result showing a full-strength aftereffect that is generated by an invisible stimulus implies normal, unperturbed neural activation at the site of adaptation. This outcome implies that the neural correlates of the visual phenomenon that are used to render the adapting stimulus invisible lie beyond the neural mechanisms that are responsible for the aftereffect. This line of reasoning has been applied to the study of binocular rivalry and visual crowding, which are two extensively studied visual phenomena that are used to ''erase'' visual stimuli from awareness (2). The results have shown that full-strength pattern and motion aftereffects (MAEs) can be induced even when the high-contrast inducing stimuli were absent from awareness for a substantial portion of the adaptation period during binocular rivalry (3-7) and crowding (8, 9). Because adaptation producing these aftereffects includes neural events that presumably occur within cortical areas ranging from the primary visual cortex (V1) (10-12) to the middle-temporal visual area (12, 13), these psychophysical findings have reasonably been interpreted as evidence for the high-level origin of both rivalry (14, 15) and crowding (8,14). Also, these same results were regarded by some workers as key psychophysical evidence against the direct involvement of V1 neurons in conscious visual awareness (16)(17)(18)(19). Measurement of full-strength aftereffects under conditions of rivalry and crowding shows a clear dissociation between the abolished perceptual awareness of the adapting stimulus and unperturbe...

Despite growing evidence for perceptual interactions between motion and position, no unifying framework exists to account for these two key features of our visual experience. We show that percepts of both object position and motion derive from a common object-tracking system-a system that optimally integrates sensory signals with a realistic model of motion dynamics, effectively inferring their generative causes. The object-tracking model provides an excellent fit to both position and motion judgments in simple stimuli. With no changes in model parameters, the same model also accounts for subjects' novel illusory percepts in more complex moving stimuli. The resulting framework is characterized by a strong bidirectional coupling between position and motion estimates and provides a rational, unifying account of a number of motion and position phenomena that are currently thought to arise from independent mechanisms. This includes motion-induced shifts in perceived position, perceptual slow-speed biases, slowing of motions shown in visual periphery, and the well-known curveball illusion. These results reveal that motion perception cannot be isolated from position signals. Even in the simplest displays with no changes in object position, our perception is driven by the output of an objecttracking system that rationally infers different generative causes of motion signals. Taken together, we show that object tracking plays a fundamental role in perception of visual motion and position.visual motion perception | Kalman filter | object tracking | causal inference | motion-induced position shift R esearch into the basic mechanisms of visual motion processing has largely focused on simple cases in which motion signals are fixed in space and constant over time (e.g., moving patterns presented in static windows) (1). Although this approach has resulted in considerable advances in our understanding of low-level motion mechanisms, it leaves open the question of how the brain integrates changing motion and position signals; when objects move in the world, motion generally co-occurs with changes in object position. The process of generating coherent estimates of object motion and position is known in the engineering and computer vision literature as "tracking" (e.g., as used by the Global Positioning System) (2). Conceptualizing motion and position perception in the broader context of object tracking suggests an alternative conceptual framework-one that we show provides a unifying account for a number of perceptual phenomena.An optimal tracking system would integrate incoming position and motion signals with predictive information from the recent past to continuously update perceptual estimates of both an object's position and its motion. Were such a system to underlie perception, position and motion should be perceptually coupled in predictable ways. Signatures of such a coupling appear in a number of known phenomena. On one hand, local motion signals can predictively bias position percepts (3-8). On the other hand, we can pe...

Summary Early psychologists, including Galton, Cattell, and Spearman proposed that intelligence and simple sensory discriminations are constrained by common neural processes, predicting a close link between them [1, 2]. However, strong supporting evidence for this hypothesis remains elusive. Although people with higher intelligence quotients (IQs) are quicker at processing sensory stimuli [1–5], these broadly replicated findings explain a relatively modest proportion of variance in IQ. Processing speed alone is, arguably, a poor match for the information processing demands on the neural system. Our brains operate on overwhelming amounts of information [6, 7], and thus their efficiency is fundamentally constrained by an ability to suppress irrelevant information [8–21]. Here, we show that individual variability in a simple visual discrimination task that reflects both processing speed and perceptual suppression [22] strongly correlates with IQ. High IQ individuals, although quick at perceiving small moving objects, exhibit disproportionately large impairments in perceiving motion as stimulus size increases. These findings link intelligence with low-level sensory suppression of large moving patterns—background-like stimuli that are ecologically less relevant [22–25]. We conjecture that the ability to suppress irrelevant and rapidly process relevant information fundamentally constrains both sensory discriminations and intelligence, providing an information-processing basis for the observed link.

We investigated the effects of attention on dominance durations during binocular rivalry. In a series of three experiments, observers performed several tasks while viewing rival stimuli to ensure and control deployment of attention. We found that endogenous attention can prolong dominance durations of attended stimulus. We developed a novel single-task procedure where observer's responses in an attentional task were used to objectively estimate dominance durations of the attended stimulus. Using this procedure, we showed that paying attention to the stimulus features involved in rivalry is necessary for prolonging dominance durations--mere engagement of attention during rivalry was insufficient. Finally, we were able to simulate the effects of endogenous attention by doubling the contrast of the attended stimulus while it was dominant. Attention may increase the apparent contrast of the attended stimulus, thereby prolonging its dominance duration. Overall, our results indicate that dominance durations in rivalry can be prolonged when observers are performing an attentionally demanding task on the rival stimulus.