Abstract/Summary

The perceived position of stationary objects can appear shifted in space due to the presence of motion in another part of the visual field (motion drag). We investigated this phenomenon with global motion Gabor arrays. These arrays consist of randomly oriented Gabors (Gaussian windowed sinusoidal luminance modulations) whose speed is set such that the normal component of the individual Gabor’s motion is consistent with a single 2D global velocity. Global motion arrays were shown to alter the perceived position of nearby stationary objects. The size of this shift was the same as that induced by arrays of Gabors uniformly oriented in the direction of global motion and drifting at the global motion speed. Both types of array were found to be robust to large changes in array density and exhibited the same time course of effect. The motion drag induced by the global motion arrays was consistent with the estimated 2D global velocity, rather than by the component of the local velocities in the global motion direction. This suggests that the motion signal that induces motion drag originates at or after a stage at which local motion signals have been integrated to produce a global motion estimate.