Undersampling produces non-veridical motion perception, but not necessarily motion reversal, in peripheral vision

We investigated motion perception in peripheral vision (10-40 deg eccentricity) for drifting gratings above and below the Nyquist limit set by neural sampling of the retinal image. We found that psychometric functions for motion discrimination rarely exhibited worse-than-chance performance indicative of motion reversal. A series of control experiments indicated that failure to demonstrate motion reversal could not be attributed to: (1) failure to detect the contrast of the stimulus; (2) failure to detect the motion of the stimulus; (3) use of an inappropriate range of spatial frequencies. Although consistent motion reversal was not observed, additional experiments demonstrated that motion perception was nevertheless non-veridical for spatial frequencies above the Nyquist limit. These seemingly contradictory results were reconciled by the observation that aliased patterns could appear to move in several different directions, all of which were different from the direction of stimulus, but only of which was opposite to the stimulus direction. Nyquist limits inferred from motion discrimination lie near the predictions for P-ganglion cells in human retina and well above M-cell predictions, which implies the M-cell array is too sparse to account for the limits to verdical motion perception in peripheral vision.