Independent processing across spatial frequency in moving broadband patterns

The aim of the experiments was to discover whether the visual system has independent access to motion information at different spatial scales when presented with a broadband stimulus. Subjects were required to discriminate between a pair of two-frame motion sequences, one containing a coherently displacing pattern and the other containing a pattern with high-frequency noise. The stimuli were either narrowband (1 octave) or broadband (6 octaves spanning 0.23-15.0 cycles deg-1) and their power spectra were either flat or followed a 1/f2 function. For the broadband stimuli, noise was introduced cumulatively into increasingly lower frequencies. For the narrowband stimuli, noise was introduced into the same frequency band as the signal. All stimuli could be defined by the lowest noise frequency (nl) they contained. For each stimulus, the largest spatial displacement across the two frames at which the task could be performed was measured (dmax). For the narrowband stimuli, dmax increased as nl was lowered. This was true over the entire frequency range for the 1/f2 stimuli, though the task became impossible for the flat-spectrum stimuli at the lowest frequencies. This is attributed to the very low contrast of these latter stimuli. The dmax values for the broadband stimuli tended to shadow those of the narrowband stimuli with the equivalent values of nl being around 25% lower. The data were modelled by spatiotemporally filtering the stimuli and considering the amount of directional power in the signal and noise sequences. The results suggest that there must be multiple spatial-frequency channels in operation, and that for broadband patterns the visual system has perceptual access to these individual channel outputs, utilising different filters depending on the task requirements.