Self-motion through space generates a visual pattern called optic flow. It can be used to determine one's direction of self-motion (heading). Previous studies have already shown that this perceptual ability, which is of critical importance during everyday life, changes with age. In most of these studies subjects were asked to judge whether they appeared to be heading to the left or right of a t...

Normal observers judge heading well both when moving in a straight line and when moving along a curved path. Judgments of curved path motion require depth variations in the scene while judgments of straight line heading (pure translation) do not. Here we show that a stroke patient who is impaired in low level 2D motion discrimination tasks and cannot accurately judge 3D structure from motion ca...

Sense-of-direction (SOD) has been described as a system that tracks the body’s facing direction relative to an environmental reference frame (allocentric heading). To study this system, Sholl, Kenny, and DellaPorta (2006) developed a headingrecall task and found that task accuracy correlated highly with self-reported SOD measures. This study attempts to replicate and extend their findings, by i...

When we move through the world, a pattern of expanding optic flow is generated on the retina. In completely rigid environments, this pattern signals one's direction of heading and is an important source of information for navigation. When we walk towards an oncoming person, the optic environment is not rigid, as the motion vectors generated by the other person represent a composite of that pers...

Estimating our egocentric heading direction is an important component of navigation. Recent studies have explored how inertial cues from the vestibular system and optic flow signals from the visual system interact to improve perceptual precision and accuracy. Heading precision is improved through multisensory integration, whereas heading accuracy is maintained through multisensory calibration m...

Concussions in soccer are often coincident with the act of heading the ball, and some researchers have reported that soccer heading is associated with neurocognitive decrements. This study aimed to understand (a) the personality factors that may predict frequent soccer heading, and (b) how knowledge of players’ personality traits might help sport counselors persuade neurologically at-risk playe...

This article describes a self-organizing neural network architecture that transforms optic flow and eye position information into representations of heading, scene depth, and moving object locations. These representations are used to navigate reactively in simulations involving obstacle avoidance and pursuit of a moving target. The network's weights are trained during an action-perception cycle...

Sensory input reflects events that occur in the environment, but multiple events may be confounded in sensory signals. For example, under many natural viewing conditions, retinal image motion reflects some combination of self-motion and movement of objects in the world. To estimate one stimulus event and ignore others, the brain can perform marginalization operations, but the neural bases of th...

Direction of self-motion during walking is indicated by multiple cues, including optic flow, nonvisual sensory cues, and motor prediction. I measured the reliability of perceived heading from visual and nonvisual cues during walking, and whether cues are weighted in an optimal manner. I used a heading alignment task to measure perceived heading during walking. Observers walked toward a target i...

We have proposed previously a computational neural-network model by which the complex patterns of retinal image motion generated during locomotion (optic flow) can be processed by specialized detectors acting as templates for specific instances of self-motion. The detectors in this template model respond to global optic flow by sampling image motion over a large portion of the visual field thro...