An oblique effect in parafoveal motion perception

An observer's ability to discriminate the angular direction of a moving grating depends on the grating orientation. Observers can more accurately judge the angular direction of vertical or horizontal gratings than oblique gratings. We discovered that this oblique effect becomes very large at high spatial frequencies in the parafovea. Perceived direction was quantified with a direction matching task at spatial frequencies ranging from 7.6 to 22.6 c/deg. As spatial frequency increased, direction matches of oblique gratings deviated away from the diagonal and towards vertical or horizontal axes. Subjects reported that the higher spatial frequency gratings appeared as grainy noise, particularly at oblique orientations. Our results indicate that, in the parafovea, subjects perceive movement of high spatial frequencies mainly along principal meridians. One possible explanation for this effect is that the high frequency patterns are aliased by the irregular mosaic of parafoveal cones. The aliasing noise generated by irregular sampling contains spatial energy at all orientations, but perhaps only vertical and horizontal components of the noise are visible to the observer.