Visual motion and the human brain: what has neuroimaging told us?

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Abstract

Recently, neuroimaging techniques have been applied to the study of human motion perception, complementing established techniques such as psychophysics, neurophysiology and neuropsychology. Because vision, particularly motion perception, has been studied relatively extensively, it provides an interesting case study to examine the contributions and limitations of neuroimaging to cognitive neuroscience. We suggest that in the domain of motion perception neuroimaging has: (1) revealed an extensive network of motion areas throughout the human brain, in addition to the well-studied motion complex (MT+); (2) verified and extended findings from other techniques; (3) suggested extensive top-down influences on motion perception; and (4) allowed experimenters to examine the neural correlates of awareness. We discuss these contributions, along with limitations and future directions for the neuroimaging of motion.

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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