The role of human ventral visual cortex in motion perception

Abstract

Visual motion perception is fundamental to many aspects of visual perception. Visual motion perception has long been associated with the dorsal (parietal) pathway and the involvement of the ventral ‘form’ (temporal) visual pathway has not been considered critical for normal motion perception. Here, we evaluated this view by examining whether circumscribed damage to ventral visual cortex impaired motion perception. The perception of motion in basic, non-form tasks (motion coherence and motion detection) and complex structure-from-motion, for a wide range of motion speeds, all centrally displayed, was assessed in five patients with a circumscribed lesion to either the right or left ventral visual pathway. Patients with a right, but not with a left, ventral visual lesion displayed widespread impairments in central motion perception even for non-form motion, for both slow and for fast speeds, and this held true independent of the integrity of areas MT/V5, V3A or parietal regions. In contrast with the traditional view in which only the dorsal visual stream is critical for motion perception, these novel findings implicate a more distributed circuit in which the integrity of the right ventral visual pathway is also necessary even for the perception of non-form motion.

Ventral aspect of the visual form pathway is not critical for the perception of biological motion

“…Following a lesion sustained in adulthood (except for CR, who was aged 16 y), all individuals reported visual perceptual problems and have well-established form-processing deficits. Table 1 summarizes the key demographics, neuropsychological descriptions, and detailed visual performance (including visual motion perception) of each patient; further details are available in Supporting Information and in earlier publications [SM (61,(64)(65)(66)(67)(68)(69)(70), CR (61,(65)(66)(67)70), EL (61,(70)(71)(72)(73)(74)(75), GB (61,75), SH (70,75), and EC (61)]. Experiment 1.…”

“…For structural image-acquisition details, see Supporting Information. We followed a lesion delineation procedure that has been successfully used before (61). Highresolution anatomical images (EL, SM, and CR) were coregistered onto a T1 MNI canonical SPM image using SPM (www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm), after which the lesions were traced manually in MRIcroN (www.cabiatl.com/ mricro/mricro; see Supporting Information for tracing criteria) and saved as a binary image.…”

Which visual functions depend on intermediate visual regions? Insights from a case of developmental visual form agnosia

“…However as he was tested on them only after the training ended, the influence of the visual training cannot be ruled out as a contributing factor. These include figure-ground assignment based on local or on convexity cues (Brooks and Driver, 2010;Brooks et al, 2012), motion detection (Gilaie-Dotan et al, 2011, 2013c, motion coherence (Meteyard et al, 2008;Gilaie-Dotan et al, 2013b, 2013cLev et al, 2015), biological motion perception from point light displays (Johansson, 1973;Saygin, 2007;GilaieDotan et al, 2011GilaieDotan et al, , 2015, recognizing body expressions in context from static images (Aviezer et al, 2012a), and performance on the L-POST testing for assortment of midlevel visual functions Vancleef et al, 2014;Lev et al, 2015). S. Gilaie-Dotan / Neuropsychologia ∎ (∎∎∎∎) ∎∎∎-∎∎∎ areas with medium probability (group 3 in Table 2).…”

“…(For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.) 2000; Bouvier and Engel, 2006;Conway and Tsao, 2009); stereopsis, which on top of V1 is assumed to rely on multiplicity of regions including ventral V4 and LOC in the ventral stream (Cowey and Porter, 1979;Janssen et al, 2000;Gilaie-Dotan et al, 2002;Roe et al, 2007) and regions in the dorsal pathway (Marotta et al, 1997;Roe et al, 2007;Georgieva et al, 2009); visual motion relying on a multitude of regions including MTþ /V5, pSTS, vPMC, and even ventral visual cortex (Zihl et al, 1983;Newsome and Pare, 1988;Salzman et al, 1990;Celebrini and Newsome, 1995;Saygin, 2007;van Kemenade et al, 2012;Gilaie-Dotan et al, 2013c;Zihl and Heywood, 2015); and reading, which is assumed to rely on ventral occipital regions (Seghier et al, 2012;Behrmann and Plaut, 2014). Fourth, it is unlikely that all the functions within each class/group rely on joint mechanisms.…”

“…object-sensitive LOC (Malach et al, 1995;Grill-Spector et al, 1998), face-sensitive "FFA" (Kanwisher et al, 1997;McCarthy et al, 1997;Levy et al, 2001) and processes and even in visual awareness [e.g. motion perception (Zihl et al, 1983;Newsome and Pare, 1988;Salzman et al, 1992;Schiller, 1993;Gilaie-Dotan et al, 2013c), object, face and word perception (Behrmann and Kimchi, 2003;Barton, 2011;Konen et al, 2011;Behrmann and Plaut, 2014), and awareness (Lamme and Roelfsema, 2000;Silvanto et al, 2005;Silvanto, 2014)], investigating the contribution of intermediate visual regions to our visual perceptual experience lags behind and therefore remains unclear.…”