Segregation of object and background motion in the retina

Bence P. Ölveczky, Stephen A. Baccus and Markus Meister ()
Additional contact information
Bence P. Ölveczky: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Stephen A. Baccus: Harvard University
Markus Meister: Harvard University

Nature, 2003, vol. 423, issue 6938, 401-408

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature01652 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:423:y:2003:i:6938:d:10.1038_nature01652

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature01652

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().