Pattern specificity of human visual motion processing

Visual motion processing is strongly susceptible to adaptation. A variety of patterns have been used as stimuli in previous studies. Three of these, namely random dots, barcode-like gratings, and sinusoidal gratings, were compared in the present study using motion-onset visual evoked potentials (VEPs). We assessed the effects of the adaptation pattern and the test pattern to which the VEP is recorded. Furthermore, we evaluated the interaction between both, i.e. whether differences between adaptation and test pattern affect the response. Isodirectional and antidirectional adaptation were used to differentiate between the actual motion adaptation and associated flicker adaptation. Motion adaptation was almost 2.5-fold stronger (p < 0.01) if the same rather than different pattern types were used for both adaptation and test. This implies that separate neural populations are involved, suggesting the presence of pattern-tuned motion mechanisms.