Asymmetric ON-OFF processing of visual motion cancels variability induced by the structure of natural scenes
- Yale University, United States
- Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, United States
Abstract
Animals detect motion using a variety of visual cues that reflect regularities in the natural world. Experiments in animals across phyla have shown that motion percepts incorporate both pairwise and triplet spatiotemporal correlations that could theoretically benefit motion computation. However, it remains unclear how visual systems assemble these cues to build accurate motion estimates. Here we used systematic behavioral measurements of fruit fly motion perception to show how flies combine local pairwise and triplet correlations to reduce variability in motion estimates across natural scenes. By generating synthetic images with statistics controlled by maximum entropy distributions, we show that the triplet correlations are useful only when images have light-dark asymmetries that mimic natural ones. This suggests that asymmetric ON-OFF processing is tuned to the particular statistics of natural scenes. Since all animals encounter the world's light-dark asymmetries, many visual systems are likely to use asymmetric ON-OFF processing to improve motion estimation.
Data availability
All data and code to reproduce figures here are available at:https://github.com/ClarkLabCode/ThirdOrderKernelCodeData is also available on Dryad under https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.7jm87bt
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Data from: Measured perceptual nonlinearities show how ON-OFF asymmetric processing improves motion estimation in natural scenesDryad Digital Repository, 10.5061/dryad.7jm87bt.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institutes of Health (R01EY026555)
- Juyue Chen
- Damon A Clark
National Science Foundation (IOS1558103)
- Juyue Chen
- Damon A Clark
Chicago Community Trust (Searle Scholar Award)
- Holly B Mandel
- Damon A Clark
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- James E Fitzgerald
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Research Fellowship)
- Damon A Clark
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2019, Chen et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Asymmetric ON-OFF processing of visual motion cancels variability induced by the structure of natural scenes
eLife 8:e47579.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.47579
