Detection of periodic motion trajectories: Effects of frequency and radius

Periodic trajectories are an important component of biological motion. Or, Thabet, Wilkinson, and Wilson (2011) studied radial frequency (RF) motion trajectory detection and concluded that, for RF2-5 trajectories, the threshold function paralleled that of static RF patterns. We have extended Or et al.'s (2011) findings to a broader range of RFs (three to 24 cycles) and across a 4-fold range of radii (1°-4°). We report that (a) thresholds for RF trajectories decrease as a power function of RF for low RF trajectories (three to six cycles) before approaching an asymptote at high RFs (12-24 cycles); (b) detection thresholds for RF trajectories scale proportionally with radius; and (c) there is no lower versus upper field advantage in the parafoveal field for stimuli displaced from fixation on the vertical midline. The results are compared to earlier findings for static RF thresholds, and we argue that our findings support the existence of parallel spatial and temporal processing channels that may contribute to both action perception and production.