Modern Discoveries in Neuroscience... And What They Reveal About You (Collection)

12. Perceiving motion

Another key perceptual quality to consider in exploring how the visual brain works is motion. Although Zhiyong Yang had struggled early on to make some sense of motion in empirical terms, we had put this issue aside while focusing on brightness, color, and geometry as perceptual domains that would be more tractable in trying to understand how brains use sense information that can’t specify the physical world directly. The main reason for this reticence was that we had no idea how to determine object motion in three-dimensional space, the information we needed to test the idea that perceptions of motion arise empirically. A less straightforward concern was the conceptual difficulty that an empirical explanation of motion ...