Comparison of the spatial-frequency selectivity of local and global motion detectors

Convergent physiological and behavioral evidence indicates that the initial receptive fields responsible for motion detection are spatially localized. Consequently, the perception of global patterns of movement (such as expansion) requires that the output of these local mechanisms be integrated across visual space. We have differentiated local and global motion processes, with mixtures of coherent and incoherent moving patterns composed of bandpass filtered dots, and have measured their spatial-frequency selectivity. We report that local motion detectors show narrow-band spatial-frequency tuning (i.e., they respond only to a narrow range of spatial frequencies) but that global motion detectors show broadband spatial-frequency tuning (i.e., they integrate across a broad range of spatial frequencies), with a preference for low spatial frequencies.