Dynamics of Visual Motion Processing

Motion processing is an essential piece of the complex brain machinery that allows us to reconstruct the 3D layout of objects in the environment, to break camouflage, to perform scene segmentation, to estimate the ego movement, and to control our action. Although motion perception and its neural basis have been a topic of intensive research and modeling the last two decades, recent experimental evidences have stressed the dynamical aspects of motion integration and segmentation. This book presents the most recent approaches that have changed our view of biological motion processing. These new experimental evidences call for new models emphasizing the collective dynamics of large population of neurons rather than the properties of separate individual filters. Chapters will stress how the dynamics of motion processing can be used as a general approach to understand the brain dynamics itself.

Guillaume S. Masson is Director of Research at the Institut de Neurosciences Cognitives de la Méditerranée (CNRS & Université de la Méditerranée) where he is the head of the team Dynamics of Vision and Action. His research is devoted to understanding the sensory mechanisms involved in controlling our actions, in particular the link between visual motion processing and tracking eye movements. Behavioral studies conducted in both humans and animals are combined with physiological studies conducted at the population level.

Uwe J. Ilg is Professor at the Hertie-Institute for Clinical Brain Research (HIH) and the Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN) in Tuebingen in the beautiful south of Germany. He tries to gain deeper insights into the fundamentals of sensorimotor integration underlying vision by a combination of perceptual and behavioral studies of humans and animals together with the analysis of single-unit response properties.