Human cortical response to various apparent motions: A magnetoencephalographic study

The human visual system is considered to have at least two different mechanisms for perceiving motions: one for luminance-based (first-order) motions and another for non-luminance-based (second-order) motions. In this study, we examined the perception of first- and second-order motions using four different types of stimulus cues (luminance, contrast, texture, and flicker) while using whole head magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure human brain responses to those apparent motions. MEG responses to all stimuli were recorded from the occipito-temporal area (possibly human MT/V5+), and response properties (peak latency and amplitude) varied with stimulus cues. Further, we observed various effects of luminance-addition to the non-luminance cues on the response properties that could not be explained by the magnetic field distribution and/or the visibility of the stationary object. The results indicate that differences in response properties elicited by various stimulus cues represent differences in the neural processes underlying apparent motions with various cues. We suggest that the distinct “preprocessing” of each stimulus cue occurs before the common process for apparent motion, and the response property changes associated with different cues are related to differences in preprocessing that may occur in a distributed cortical network that include the striate and extrastriate visual cortex.