Motion aftereffect as a function of the contrast of sinusoidal gratings

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Abstract

The motion aftereffect resulting from adaptation to moving vertical gratings has been measured as a function of the grating contrast from threshold up to 10.5%. The gratings consisted of spatial sinusoidal intensity modulations which were generated on the face of an oscilloscope. The contrasts of the adapting grating and of the test grating could be varied independently. Both the duration and the initial apparent speed of the aftereffect were measured. When the test grating contrast was held constant, the motion aftereffect magnitude increased rapidly with the contrast of the adapting grating up to about 3%; for higher contrasts incremental increases in contrast resulted in much smaller aftereffect increases than at the lower contrasts. When the adapting grating contrast was held constant, the aftereffect was found to be strongest for the lowest test contrasts and became weaker as the test contrast was increased. These psychophysical results support the hypothesis that foveal direction-specific motion detecting mechanisms show only a limited or compressed response to stimulus contrast.

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