A motion-energy model predicts the direction discrimination and MAE duration of two-stroke apparent motion at high and low retinal illuminance

Two-stroke apparent motion offers a challenge to current theoretical models of motion processing and is thus a useful tool for investigating motion sensor input. The stimulus involves repeated presentation of two pattern frames containing a spatial displacement, with a blank inter-stimulus interval (ISI) at one of the two-frame transitions. The resulting impression of continuous motion was measured here using both direction discrimination and motion after-effect duration in order to assess the extent to which data using the two measures can be explained by a computational model without reference to attentive tracking mechanisms. The motion-energy model was found to offer a very good account of the psychophysical data using similar parameters for both tasks. The experiment was run under both photopic and scotopic retinal illumination. Data revealed that the optimum ISI for perceiving two-stroke apparent motion shifts to longer ISIs under scotopic conditions, providing evidence for a biphasic impulse response at low luminance. Best-fitting model parameters indicate that motion sensors receive inputs from temporal filters whose central temporal frequency shifts from 2.5 to 3.0 Hz at high retinal illuminance to 1.0–1.5 Hz at low retinal illuminance.