About the Cover
Cover picture: Rotating Snakes, by Akiyoshi Kitaoka,
adapted by Bevil Conway. In this powerful static
motion illusion, the direction of illusory motion is
yellow —> black —> blue —> white. Psychophysical
and physiological experiments described in our paper
show that the critical feature of the illusion is the
luminance contrast of the elements compared with
the average gray of the entire display. Direction selective
neurons in primary visual cortex and the
motion area [middle temporal area (MT)] respond to
the luminance contrast of the elements in a
configuration-dependent way, serving as the
physiological building blocks for the illusion. For
details, see the article by Conway et al. in this issue (pages 5651-5656)
[Table of Contents]
Copyright © 2005 by Society for Neuroscience.
