Contrast-dependent effects of smooth pursuit eye movement on the perceived direction of ambiguous retinal motion(Summary of Awarded Presentation at the 29th Annual Meeting)

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When an apparent motion stimulus with an ambiguous direction in the retinal image is presented during smooth pursuit eye movements, the dominant perceived direction is opposite to the direction of eye movement (Terao et al., 2009). Here we report that pursuit of a stimulus characterized either by continuous ambiguous motion or by discrete apparent motion facilitates retinal motion opposite to the direction of the pursuit. This finding suggests that pursuit enhances motion signals in the opposite direction of the pursuit relative to signals in the same direction. We then investigated how stimulus contrast affected motion perception during pursuit because a previous study reported that sensitivity to the contrast of luminance grating was reduced for signals moving in the opposite direction of the pursuit (Schutz et al., 2007). Our results demonstrated that the perceived direction was opposite to the pursuit direction when the grating contrast was high, whereas the perceived and pursuit directions were the same when the grating contrast was low. This result indicates that pursuit has different effects on motion signals depending on the level of stimulus contrast.
2011-09-30