Abstract
Recent evidence indicates that motion smear can provide useful information for the detection and discrimination of motion. Further, it has been shown that the perception of motion smear depends critically on the density of dots in a random-dot (RD) stimulus. Therefore, in the present experiments, the contribution of perceived motion smear to direction-of-motion discrimination was evaluated using RD targets of different densities. Thresholds for direction-of-motion discrimination and the extent of perceived motion smear were determined for RD stimuli with densities of 1, 2, and 10 dots/deg2, presented for 200 msec at a velocity of 4, 8, or 12 deg/sec. To evaluate the contribution of information about orientation from motion smear, thresholds for orientation discrimination were measured using parallel lines with the same length as the extent of perceived smear. Despite the opportunity for increased summation as RD density increases, our results indicate that direction-of-motion discrimination worsens. Because perception of motion smear is reduced with an increase in RD density, our results are consistent with a facilitation of direction-of-motion discrimination by visible motion smear.
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This study was supported by Research Award R01 EY05068 and Core Center Grant P30 EY07551 from the National Eye Institute and Research Award 003652-0185-2001 from the Texas Advanced Research Program.
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Tong, J., Aydin, M. & Bedell, H.E. Direction-of-motion discrimination is facilitated by visible motion smear. Perception & Psychophysics 69, 48–55 (2007). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194452
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194452