Bistable Glass-pattern motion reveals two different processes

Examining the two motion processes is an elusive task due to the difficulty of finding a proper stimulus paradigm. A rotational Glass pattern created with a random-dot array by superimposing its rotated version on the top of it can provide such a paradigm. If we displace only its rotated part in the vertical or horizontal direction, a bistable motion occurs; local dot motion in the same direction and Glass-pattern motion in the orthogonal direction. From two experiments, we found local dot motion is predominant in short spatiotemporal range and global pattern motion in long spatiotemporal range. Since the stimulus allows us to maintain all of its properties identical except for the changes in spatiotemporal parameters, this result shows more robustly that the energy-based first-order motion favors short spatiotemporal ranges while the pattern-based second-order motion favors long spatiotemporal ranges.