Motion adaptation improves acuity (but perceived size doesn't matter)

Recognition acuity—the minimum size of a high-contrast object that allows us to recognize it—is limited by optical and neural elements of the eye and by processing within the visual cortex. The perceived size of objects can be changed by motion-adaptation. Viewing receding or looming motion makes subsequently viewed stimuli appear to grow or shrink, respectively. It has been reported that resulting changes in perceived size impact recognition acuity. We set out to determine if such acuity changes are reliable and what drives this phenomenon. We measured the effect of adaptation to receding and looming motion on acuity for crowded tumbling-T stimuli ([Image: see text]). We quantified the role of crowding, individuals’ susceptibility to motion-adaptation, and potentially confounding effects of pupil size and eye movements. Adaptation to receding motion made targets appear larger and improved acuity (–0.037 logMAR). Although adaptation to looming motion made targets appear smaller, it induced not the expected decrease in acuity but a modest acuity improvement (–0.018 logMAR). Further, each observer's magnitude of acuity change was not correlated with their individual perceived-size change following adaptation. Finally, we found no evidence that adaptation-induced acuity gains were related to crowding, fixation stability, or pupil size. Adaptation to motion modestly enhances visual acuity, but unintuitively, this is dissociated from perceived size. Ruling out fixation and pupillary behavior, we suggest that motion adaptation may improve acuity via incidental effects on sensitivity—akin to those arising from blur adaptation—which shift sensitivity to higher spatial frequency-tuned channels.