Contribution of human short-wave cones to luminance and motion detection

1. Human short-wave S cone signals are important for colour vision and here we examine whether the S cone signals also contribute to motion and luminance. 2. Detection was measured with moving patterns that selectively stimulated S cones-violet sine-wave gratings of 1 cycle deg-1 on an intense yellowish field. For rates up to 12 Hz, detection was governed by non-directional mechanisms, possibly of a chromatic nature, as shown by three findings: moving gratings had to be suprathreshold for their direction to be identified; the threshold ratio of counterphase flickering versus moving gratings was low; and direction-selective adaptation was essentially absent. 3. Evidence for less sensitive, directional mechanisms includes the following: at high velocity, the direction of movement of the violet gratings can be identified just slightly above the detection threshold; directional adaptation was strong with a suprathreshold test pattern; velocity was seen veridically for clearly suprathreshold patterns; and a counterphase flickering test, added in spatial-temporal quadrature phase to a similar suprathreshold mask, had identical detection and direction-identification thresholds. 4. Interactions of long-wave L cone and S cone signals in direction-selective mechanisms were measured with an orange counterphase grating and a violet counterphase test, both flickering at the same rate and presented in spatial quadrature phase on the yellowish adapting field. Direction identification thresholds, measured as a function of the temporal phase of two gratings, demonstrated both that the S cone signal lags considerably behind the L cone signal (an effect that strongly varies with S cone light adaptation), and more strikingly, the S cone signal summates with a negative sign and thus is effectively inverted in direction-selective mechanisms. 5. Quantitatively similar temporal phase functions were obtained with uniform violet and orange flicker when a luminance discrimination criterion was used: thus the S cone signal summates negatively with the L cone signal for both discrimination of luminance flicker and the direction of motion. 6. The temporal phase functions accurately predicted threshold summation for identifying the direction of motion of a pair of violet and orange gratings moving with the same velocity but with different spatial phase offsets. Once the relative temporal phase lag of the S cones was compensated for, there was linear threshold summation for the violet and orange patterns when presented in effective (physiological) spatial antiphase, and clear cancellation when presented in phase. This and related experiments show a linear summation of S, M and L cone signals for direction detection, with the S cones having a negative sign.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)