The initial torsional Ocular Following Response (tOFR) in humans: A response to the total motion energy in the stimulus?

We recorded the initial torsional Ocular Following Responses (tOFRs) elicited at short latency by visual images that occupied the frontal plane and rotated about the lines of sight. Using 1-D radial gratings, the local spatio-temporal characteristics of these tOFRs closely resembled those we previously reported for the hOFRs to horizontal motion with 1-D vertical gratings. When the 1-D radial grating was subdivided into a number of concentric annuli, each with the same radial thickness, tOFRs were less than predicted from the sum of the responses to the individual annuli: spatial normalization. However, the normalization was much weaker than that which we previously reported for the hOFRs. Further, when the number, thickness and contrast of these concentric annuli were varied systematically, the latency and magnitude of the tOFRs were well described by single monotonic functions when plotted against the product of the total area of the annuli and the square of their Michelson contrast ("A*C(2)"), consistent with the hypothesis that the onset and magnitude of the initial tOFR are determined by the total motion energy in the stimulus. When our previously published hOFR data were plotted against A*C(2), a single monotonic function sufficed to describe the latency but not the magnitude.