Segregation of object and background motion in the retina
Abstract
An important task in vision is to detect objects moving within a stationary scene. During normal viewing this is complicated by the presence of eye movements that continually scan the image across the retina, even during fixation. To detect moving objects, the brain must distinguish local motion within the scene from the global retinal image drift due to fixational eye movements. We have found that this process begins in the retina: a subset of retinal ganglion cells responds to motion in the receptive field centre, but only if the wider surround moves with a different trajectory. This selectivity for differential motion is independent of direction, and can be explained by a model of retinal circuitry that invokes pooling over nonlinear interneurons. The suppression by global image motion is probably mediated by polyaxonal, wide-field amacrine cells with transient responses. We show how a population of ganglion cells selective for differential motion can rapidly flag moving objects, and even segregate multiple moving objects.
Additional Information
© 2003 Nature Publishing Group. Received 20 December 2002; Accepted 18 March 2003; Published online 11 May 2003. We thank members of the Meister laboratory for advice; P. Cavanagh, F. Engert, V. Murthy and K. Nakayama for comments on the manuscript; and H. van der Steen for providing the eye movement data in Fig. 1b. This work was supported by a grant from NEI (M.M.) and NRSA (S.A.B.). The authors declare no competing financial interests.Attached Files
Supplemental Material - nature01652-s1.pdf
Supplemental Material - nature01652-s2.pdf
Supplemental Material - nature01652-s3.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 75705
- DOI
- 10.1038/nature01652
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20170404-152615141
- National Eye Institute
- NIH Predoctoral Fellowship
- Created
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2017-04-04Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-15Created from EPrint's last_modified field