Journal Paper "A Functional Architecture for Motion Pattern Processing in MSTd"

        Psychophysical studies suggest the existence of specialized detectors for component motion patterns (radial, circular, and spiral), consistent with the visual motion properties of cells in the dorsal medial superior temporal area (MSTd) of non-human primates. Here we use a biologically constrained model of visual motion processing in MSTd in conjunction with human performance on two motion pattern tasks to elucidate the neural structures and computational mechanisms associated with the processing of wide-field motion patterns encountered during self-motion. We demonstrate that interconnected neural populations, which systematically inhibit non-responsive units, are necessary to achieve robust psychophysical performance. We show that while independently responding motion pattern units are capable of encoding visual information relevant to the psychophysical tasks, such populations are not computationally sufficient to extract perceptual estimates consistent with human performance. We show that the cyclic trends in psychophysical performance can be achieved using interconnected populations whose horizontal connections are a function of the similarity in preferred motion patterns and receptive field locations between units.