Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 104, Issue 9, Pages 3532-3537Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0611288104
Keywords
human psychophysics; MT/V5; read-out algorithms; visual motion; population coding
Categories
Funding
- Wellcome Trust Funding Source: Medline
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Physiological studies suggest that decision networks read from the neural representation in the middle temporal area to determine the perceived direction of visual motion, whereas psychophysical studies tend to characterize motion perception in terms of the statistical properties of stimuli. To reconcile these different approaches, we examined whether estimating the central tendency of the physical direction of global motion was a better indicator of perceived direction than algorithms (e.g., maximum likelihood) that read from directionally tuned mechanisms near the end of the motion pathway. The task of human observers was to discriminate the global direction of random dot kinematograms composed of asymmetrical distributions of local directions with distinct measures of central tendency. None of the statistical measures of image direction central tendency provided consistently accurate predictions of perceived global motion direction. However, regardless of the local composition of motion directions, a maximum-likelihood decoder produced global motion estimates commensurate with the psychophysical data. Our results suggest that mechanism-based, read-out algorithms offer a more accurate and robust guide to human motion perception than any stimulus-based, statistical estimate of central tendency.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available