M. Lappe, FUNCTIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF AN INTEGRATION OF MOTION AND STEREOPSIS INAREA MT OF MONKEY EXTRASTRIATE VISUAL-CORTEX, Neural computation, 8(7), 1996, pp. 1449-1461
Experimental evidence from neurophysiological recordings in the middle
temporal (MT) area of the macaque monkey suggests that motion-selecti
ve cells can use disparity information to separate motion signals that
originate from different depths. This finding of a cross-talk between
different visual channels has implications for the understanding of t
he processing of motion in the primate visual system and especially fo
r behavioral tasks requiring the determination of global motion. In th
is paper, the consequences for the analysis of optic flow fields are e
xplored. A network model is presented that effectively uses the dispar
ity sensitivity of MT-like neurons for the reduction of noise in optic
flow fields. Simulations reproduce the recent psychophysical finding
that the robustness of the human optic flow processing system is impro
ved by stereoscopic depth information, but that the use of this inform
ation depends on the structure of the visual environment.