Monocular mechanisms determine plaid motion coherence

Although the neural location of the plaid motion coherence process is not precisely known, the middle temporal (MT) cortical area has been proposed as a likely candidate. This claim rests largely on the neurophysiological findings showing that in response to plaid stimuli, a subgroup of cells in area MT responds to the pattern direction, whereas cells in area V1 respond only to the directions of the component gratings. In Experiment 1, we report that the coherent motion of a plaid pattern can be completely abolished following adaptation to a grating which moves in the plaid direction and has the same spatial period as the plaid features (the so-called “blobs”). Interestingly, we find this phenomenon is monocular: monocular adaptation destroys plaid coherence in the exposed eye but leaves it unaffected in the other eye. Experiment 2 demonstrates that adaptation to a purely binocular (dichoptic) grating does not affect perceived plaid coherence. These data suggest several conclusions: (1) that the mechanism determining plaid coherence responds to the motion of plaid features, (2) that the coherence mechanism is monocular, and thus (3), that it is probably located at a relatively low level in the visual system and peripherally to the binocular mechanisms commonly presumed to underlie two-dimensional (2-D) motion perception. Experiment 3 examines the spatial tuning of the monocular coherence mechanism and our results suggest it is broadly tuned with a preference for lower spatial frequencies. In Experiment 4, we examine whether perceived plaid direction is determined by the motion of the grating components or the features. Our data strongly support a feature-based model.