Spatial resolution and receptive field height of motion sensors in human vision

We estimated the length of motion-detecting receptive fields in human vision by measuring direction discrimination for three novel stimuli. The motion sequences contained either (i) alternate frames of two differently oriented sinusoidal gratings; (ii) alternate frames of vertical grating and plaid stimuli or (iii) a vertical grating divided into horizontal strips of equal height, where alternate strips moved leftward and rightward. All three stimulus sequences had a similar appearance (of moving strips) and the task was to identify the direction of the central strip. For sequences (ii) and (iii), performance fell as the strip height decreased. Threshold height fell with increasing contrast up to about 20%, then levelled off at the critical strip height. Temporal frequency (1. 9-15 Hz) had no effect on the critical strip height. We argue that the receptive field length corresponds to twice this critical height. The length estimates were strikingly short, ranging from about 0.4 cycles at 3.0 cpd to 0.1 cycles at 0.1 cpd. These lengths agree well with the estimates derived at threshold by Anderson and Burr (1991, J. Opt. Soc. Am. A8, 1330-1339), and imply that the motion-sensing filters have very broad orientation tuning. These and other results are interpreted within the framework of a Gaussian derivative model for motion filtering. The sensitivity of motion filters to a broad range of orientations suggests a simpler view of how coherent plaid motion is processed.