Jd. Victor et Mm. Conte, INVESTIGATION OF A PATIENT WITH SEVERELY IMPAIRED DIRECTION DISCRIMINATION - EVIDENCE AGAINST THE INTERSECTION-OF-CONSTRAINTS MODEL, Vision research, 34(2), 1994, pp. 267-277
A man with presumed posterior cortical atrophy had a markedly elevated
threshold for orientation discrimination (approx. 25 deg) and selecti
ve impairment of ''pop-out'' tasks based on orientation. Direction dis
crimination for moving plaids was superior to direction discrimination
for their component gratings. The superior performance for plaids dis
appeared when the spatial frequencies of the component gratings were a
ltered to eliminate coherence. This finding implies that extraction of
plaid motion is not dependent on pre-processing within narrow spatial
frequency bands. It is inconsistent with simulations based on the ''i
ntersection of constraints'' model, which predict that the error rate
for plaids would be larger than the error rate for gratings, particula
rly for the plaids composed of gratings moving at nearly opposing angl
es. It is consistent with models such as the Heeger [(1987) Journal of
the Optical Society of America A, 4, 1455-1471] model, which extract
direction from the pattern of activity across broadly-tuned spatiotemp
oral filters.