Effects of a static textured background on motion integration

We studied how the visual system integrates locally ambiguous velocities into global unambiguous coherent motion in the presence or absence of a textured background. Line drawings of complex figures were presented through invisible (i.e. same luminance and hue as the background) circular apertures such that only straight line segments were visible. These figures were either presented against a uniform background or embedded in static textures made of similar line segments in such a way that figures cannot be detected if they remain static. Under our experimental conditions, the figures translated clockwise or counterclockwise along a circular path and observers were required to discriminate the global direction of motion. Because of the aperture problem, a single moving segment cannot disambiguate the global direction of the figures and integration across multiple line segments is therefore necessary to perform the task. We found that with figures at high contrast, the presence of a texture enhanced direction discrimination, while direction discrimination of figures at low contrast was impaired by the presence of the texture. These paradoxical effects of a static texture were further tested by manipulating the relative contrast between figures and texture, the motion onset asynchrony (the delay between stimulus onset and motion onset or MOA), the density, the orientation and the distribution of texture elements. The effects of the texture, either facilitation or suppression, increase with texture contrast. Accuracy improves with MOA and decreases with texture density. In general, at high figure contrast, accuracy is better whenever referents are present in the image. We suggest that facilitation by the texture at high figure contrast is accounted for by reduced salience of segmentation cues such as line terminators and increased accuracy of local velocity measurements. On the other hand, decreased performance at low figure contrast may reflect lateral suppression of the responses to motion signals by the texture.