Position displacement, not velocity, is the cue to motion detection of second-order stimuli

Motion detection can be achieved either with mechanisms sensitive to a target's velocity, or sensitive to change in a target's position. Using a procedure to dissociate these two provided by Nakayama and Tyler (Vis Res 1981;21:427-433), we explored detection of first-order (luminance-based) and various second-order (texture-based and stereo-based) motion. In the first experiment, observers viewed annular gratings oscillating in rotational motion at various rates. For each oscillation temporal frequency, we determined the minimum displacement of the pattern for which observers could reliably see motion. For first-order motion, these motion detection thresholds decreased with increasing temporal frequency, and thus were determined by a minimum velocity. In contrast, motion detection thresholds for second-order motion remained roughly constant across temporal frequency, and thus were determined by a minimum displacement. In Experiment 2, luminance-based gratings of different contrasts were tested to show that the velocity-dependence was not an artifact of pattern visibility. In the remaining experiments, results similar to Experiment 1 were obtained with a central presentation of a linear grating, instead of an annular grating (Experiment 3), and with a motion discrimination (phase discrimination) rather than motion detection task (Experiment 4). We conclude that, within the ranges tested here, second-order motion is more readily detected with a mechanism which tracks the change of position of features over time.