DynTex: A real-time generative model of dynamic naturalistic luminance textures

The visual systems of animals work in diverse and constantly changing environments where organism survival requires effective senses. To study the hierarchical brain networks that perform visual information processing, vision scientists require suitable tools, and Motion Clouds (MCs)-a dense mixture of drifting Gabor textons-serve as a versatile solution. Here, we present an open toolbox intended for the bespoke use of MC functions and objects within modeling or experimental psychophysics contexts, including easy integration within Psychtoolbox or PsychoPy environments. The toolbox includes output visualization via a Graphic User Interface. Visualizations of parameter changes in real time give users an intuitive feel for adjustments to texture features like orientation, spatiotemporal frequencies, bandwidth, and speed. Vector calculus tools serve the frame-by-frame autoregressive generation of fully controlled stimuli, and use of the GPU allows this to be done in real time for typical stimulus array sizes. We give illustrative examples of experimental use to highlight the potential with both simple and composite stimuli. The toolbox is developed for, and by, researchers interested in psychophysics, visual neurophysiology, and mathematical and computational models. We argue the case that in all these fields, MCs can bridge the gap between well- parameterized synthetic stimuli like dots or gratings and more complex and less controlled natural videos.