Huk AC & Heeger DJ, Pattern-motion responses in human visual cortex, Nature Neuroscience, 5:72-75, 2001.
Abstract: Physiological models of visual motion processing posit that 'pattern-motion cells' represent the direction of moving objects independent of their particular spatial pattern. We performed fMRI experiments to identify pattern-motion cells in the human brain, and to test the hypothesis that the activity of these neurons is linked to the perception of coherent motion. A protocol employing moving 'plaid' stimuli allowed us to separate pattern-motion responses from other types of motion-related activity within the same brain structures, and revealed strong pattern-motion selectivity in human visual area MT+. Reducing the perceptual coherence of the plaids yielded a corresponding decrease in pattern-motion responsivity, providing evidence that percepts of coherent motion are closely linked to the activity of pattern-motion cells.