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Journal of Neuroscience, Vol 11, 2768-2785, Copyright © 1991 by Society for Neuroscience
The response of area MT and V1 neurons to transparent motion
RJ Snowden, S Treue, RG Erickson and RA Andersen
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge 02139.
An important use of motion information is to segment a complex visual scene
into surfaces and objects. Transparent motions present a particularly
difficult problem for segmentation because more than one velocity vector
occurs at each local region in the image, and current machine vision
systems fail in these circumstances. The fact that motion transparency is
prevalent in natural scenes, and yet artificial systems display an
inability to analyze it, suggests that the primate visual system has
developed specialized methods for perceiving transparent motion. Also, the
currently prevalent model of physiological mechanisms for motion-direction
selectivity employs inhibitory interactions between neurons; such
interactions would silence neurons under transparent conditions and render
the visual system blind to transparent motion. To examine how the primate
visual system solves this transparency problem, we recorded the activity of
direction-selective cells in the first (area V1) and in a later (area MT)
stage in the cortical motion-processing pathway in behaving monkeys. The
visual stimuli consisted of random dot patterns forming single moving
surfaces, transparent surfaces, and motion discontinuities. We found that
area V1 cells responded to their preferred direction of movement even under
transparent conditions, whereas area MT cells were suppressed under the
transparent condition. These data suggest a simple solution to the
transparency problem at the level of area V1. More than one motion vector
can be represented at a single retinal location by different subpopulations
of neurons tuned to different directions of motion; these subpopulations
may represent the early stage for segmenting different, transparent
surfaces. The results also suggest that facilitatory mechanisms, which
unlike inhibitory interactions are largely unaffected by transparent
conditions, play an important role in direction selectivity in area V1. The
inhibitory interactions for different motion directions for area MT neurons
may contribute to a mechanism for smoothing or averaging the velocity
field, computations thought to be necessary for reducing noise and
interpolating moving surfaces from sparse information.
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