Description
Some other highlights of the dissertation are as follows:
I find that the intrinsic cortical noise in the brain which manifests itself as uncertainty in motion estimation can play an important role in perception by significantly improving detectability of subliminal motion cues at the expense of a very modest drop in performance for a suprathreshold signal ala stochastic resonance.
I also did experiments on observers under the influence of marijuana and found that the THC in marijuana can cause an impairment of motion perception abilities --- observer performance decreases by as much as 15% and reaction time increases by as much as 222+-96 ms.
I find that the observer performance is invariant to dot density in the display and argue that this provides very powerful evidence against motion models based on matching dots to nearest neighbors in successive frames ala (Ullman, 1979; Dawson, 1991) etc.
I find and prove that the rotary motion signal does not depend on the center of rotation relative to which it is computed which explains the experimentally observed position invariance of MST(d) cells found by (Graziano, Andersen, & Snowden, 1994).