Visual motion and the human brain: what has neuroimaging told us?
Section snippets
Introduction and historical overview
Interest in motion perception has a long history. Several great philosophers, like Euclid, Lucretius, Ptolemy, Ibn al Haytham, have commented on different types of motion perception (e.g., apparent motion, induced motion, aftereffects of motion, etc.; see Wade, 1998). This interest is not at all surprising given that it is an extremely important faculty of the human mind. Life becomes incredibly difficult without the ability to see motion, for example as a result of a brain lesion (Riddoch, 1917
What was known about motion perception prior to neuroimaging?
Over the last three decades, much effort went into detailed parametric studies of motion sensitivity. To study motion-sensitive mechanisms, psychophysicists focussed on performance indicators, such as motion sensitivity, direction discrimination, and speed discrimination. These studies primarily focussed on motion arising from changes in luminance over space and time, the stimuli which drive motion detectors (Reichardt, 1961). However, evidence has accumulated to suggest that observers can see
What has neuroimaging added to our understanding of motion perception?
Neuroimaging techniques with good spatial resolution became available to a few groups in the 1980s and more widespread in the 1990s (for a review of the history of neuroimaging, see Savoy, 2001). Positron emission tomography (PET) allowed scientists to get a first glimpse of the human brain in action, and vision was one of the first subjects tackled (Fox et al., 1986, Roland, 1993, Zeki et al., 1991). In 1992, it became possible to use fMRI to image the intrinsic blood oxygen level-dependent
Discussion and future
Human vision in general, and motion perception in particular, are disciplines that are relatively well established by traditional methodologies and have been extensively studied with new imaging techniques developed in the “Decade of the Brain”. Thus even if one is not interested in these topics per se, it may be worthwhile to consider them as a test case for the capacity, limitations and potential of functional neuroimaging.
Through the examples of motion perception discussed above, we have
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Motion perception and its disorders
2021, Handbook of Clinical NeurologyCitation Excerpt :However, most studies of structure–function correlations in humans use either functional imaging, with positron emission tomography (PET) or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), or evoked responses with electroencephalography or magnetoencephalography. Compared to the traditional electrophysiological techniques used in animals, functional imaging has the advantage of revealing the entire network of areas involved in a task or perceptual experience, over the whole brain (Culham et al., 2001). PET studies of cerebral blood flow while the subject is perceiving motion show changes in the lateral occipital gyri, at the junction of Brodmann areas 19 and 37 (Fox et al., 1987; Corbetta et al., 1991; Zeki et al., 1991).
The neural mechanisms underlying directional and apparent circular motion assessed with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS)
2020, NeuropsychologiaCitation Excerpt :However, most of the studies focused on cardinal trajectories (Helfrich et al., 2013; Maffei et al., 2010; Pilz et al., 2017; Wattam-Bell, 2001; Weiskrantz et al., 1995; Zanker, 2005). hMT + has greater motion sensitivity than other areas involved in global motion processing such as V2, V3, V3A and KO (Culham et al., 2001; Furlan and Smith, 2016; Orban et al., 1995; Sack et al., 2006). Though Caplovitz and Tse (2007) found that area V3A is also activated by rotational motion and circular static shapes, Rees et al. (2000) found that hMT+ is characterized by a linear relationship between its activation and motion coherence, whilst V3A and KO shows a U-shaped link between activation and motion coherence.
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2014, NeuroImageCitation Excerpt :Anterior to V3A, it is the first of five spatial maps (IPS0 to IPS4; Wandell et al., 2007) that were originally described during overt and covert attention (Hagler et al., 2007; Hagler and Sereno, 2006; Schluppeck et al., 2005; Sereno et al., 2001; Tootell et al., 1998). Motion-specific responses in posterior parietal cortex have been identified previously during perception of simpler motion stimuli (Serences and Boynton, 2007a, 2007b; Hebart et al., 2012; See also Culham et al., 2001). The area encoding the motion pattern stimulus in the current study also overlaps with a posterior parietal cluster identified in our prior study where complex color patterns were encoded (Christophel et al., 2012; see Fig. 3C).
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