Spatial-frequency tuning in the pooling of one- and two-dimensional motion signals

Kaoru Amano*, Mark Edwards, David R. Badcock, Shin'ya Nishida

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    17 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Cortical neurons that initially extract motion signals have small receptive-fields, and narrow orientation- and bandpass-spatial-frequency tuning. Accurate extraction of the veridical motion of objects typically requires the global pooling of the output of multiple local-motion units across orientation and space. We examined whether the narrow spatial-frequency tuning present at the local-motion level is preserved at the global-motion-pooling stage. Stimuli consisted of numerous drifting Gabor or plaid elements that were either signal (carrier drift-speed consistent with a given global-motion vector) or noise (drift speed consistent with a random, noise vector). The carrier spatial-frequencies of the signal and noise elements were independently varied. Regardless of the frequency of the signal elements, broad low-pass masking functions were obtained for both Gabor (one-dimensional) and Plaid (two-dimensional) conditions when measuring the threshold signal ratio for identification of the global-motion direction. For the Gabor stimuli, this pattern of results was also independent of the relative orientations of the signal and noise elements. These results indicate that in the global-motion pooling of one-dimensional and two-dimensional signals, local-motion signals of all spatial frequencies are pooled into a single system that exhibits broadband, low-pass tuning.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)2862-2869
    Number of pages8
    JournalVision Research
    Volume49
    Issue number23
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 23 Nov 2009

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