Exploring the spatiotemporal properties of fractal rotation perception

A series of three experiments was conducted with the aim of determining the processing nature of the fractal rotation stimulus introduced by C. P. Benton, J. M. O'Brien, and W. Curran (2007). This stimulus has been proposed to be invisible to first-order sensitive mechanisms considering it is drift-balanced. Rather, motion perception would require the analysis of spatial structure (orientation) changing over time. In Experiment 1, spatiotemporal properties of fractal rotation perception have been explored, in comparison with first-order rotation perception. In Experiment 2, a motion paradigm similar to the one developed by K. Nakayama and C. W. Tyler (1981) and later used by A. E. Seiffert and P. Cavanagh (1998) has been used to characterize the motion processing mechanism responsible for fractal rotation perception. In Experiment 3, we have used a paradigm similar to N. E. Scott-Samuel and A. T. Smith (2000) to evaluate whether fractal rotation perception is analyzed by common or distinct mechanisms to those for first-order rotation perception. Results indicate that fractal rotation perception involves feature-tracking processes with mechanisms responding to global orientation-based changes of the image. Given the absence of cancellation of first-order and fractal rotation motion signals, we can therefore conclude that the first-order and fractal motion sensitive pathways are dissociable at early stages of the visual processing stream.