FUNCTIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF AN INTEGRATION OF MOTION AND STEREOPSIS INAREA MT OF MONKEY EXTRASTRIATE VISUAL-CORTEX

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.