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Summary: The Journal of Neuroscience, December 1994, 14(12): 7357-7366
Transparent Motion Perception as Detection of Unbalanced Motion
Signals. I. Psychophysics
Ning Qian,a
Richard A. Andersen, and Edward H. Adelson
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
Our visual system can solve the difficult problem of representing
multiple motions in the same part of the visual space, the motion
transparency problem. We investigated the conditions under
which transparent motion perception occurs through
psychophysical observations, using a series of visual displays
composed of two simple patterns moving in opposite directions.
We found that whenever a display has finely balanced opposing
motion signals in all local regions, it is perceptually non-
transparent. The displays that appeared transparent always
contain locally unbalanced motion signals, with some local
regions having net motion signals in one direction and some
other regions in the opposite direction. These interdigitating net
motion signals in both directions appear to be integrated
separately to form two overlapping transparent surfaces. Displays
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