Visual motion is processed by neurons in primary visual cortex that are sen
sitive to spatial orientation and speed. Many models of local velocity comp
utation are based on a second stage that pools the outputs of first-stage n
eurons selective for different orientations, but the nature of this pooling
remains controversial. in a human psychophysical detection experiment, we
found near-perfect summation of image energy when it was distributed unifor
mly across all orientations, but poor summation when it was concentrated in
specific orientation bands. The data are consistent with a model that inte
grates uniformly over all orientations, even when this strategy is sub-opti
mal.