Motion processing and dynamic attention in humans

运动处理是至关重要的。我们在日常活动中的许多决定不仅取决于对场景中物体的良好感知，而且还取决于我们是否想要与物体互动，或者我们是否想要避开它们。我们仍然不完全了解我们如何处理来自不同信息源的运动，我们更不知道我们是如何处理复杂的动态刺激信息的。视觉场景中的对象可以由几个已知具有不同机制的属性来定义。基本属性是基于能量的，称为一阶属性，包括亮度和颜色。其他属性不是由能量直接定义的，而是称为二阶属性，如对比度和方向。虽然很明显，一阶和二阶运动知觉机制在某种程度上是可分离的，但这并不一定意味着存在专门的二阶机制。二阶运动知觉特征类似于较慢和较粗糙的注意跟踪机制所反映的特征。类似的条件也适用于颜色定义的运动。我的NSERC计划将通过采用新的范例来解决这些问题，将可能产生亮度伪影的非线性补偿与同时使用“拥挤”的跟踪机制相结合。当空间特征彼此太近时，视觉系统就很难感知它们，尽管它们很容易被孤立地看到，而且拥挤被证明是由于无法注意刺激而不是视觉系统的空间分辨率造成的。我们周围的运动信息并不限于上面描述的孤立的运动信息块。相反，我们被各种速度和来源的移动信息轰炸，我们必须有效地整合这些信息。出于这个原因，我们将使用更复杂的动态刺激，其中注意力跟踪运动机制是非常需要的。此外，在复杂的环境中感知运动很少孤立地完成。正常情况下，我们同时站着或处理其他信息。我们之前的研究表明，即使是简单的组合活动，如保持平衡，也会影响我们处理和学习复杂动作任务的能力。研究计划的另一部分将解决这些问题，以更好地理解我们对动态刺激的处理如何随着这些额外需求的变化而变化。总之，这一系列实验将丰富我们对不同类型运动的理解，从最基本的水平到更逼真的复杂多任务条件。**

Motion processing is critical. Many of our decisions in daily activities are dependent not only on having a good perception of objects in the scene but also having an efficient appreciation of where they are going both if we want to interact with the objects or whether we want to avoid them. We still do not fully understand how we process motion derived from different information sources and we know even less about how we process complex dynamic stimuli information. Objects in a visual scene can be defined by several attributes known to have different mechanisms. The fundamental attributes are energy based and known as 1st order properties and include luminance and colour. Other attributes are not directly defined by energy and known as 2nd order attributes such as contrast and orientation. Although it is clear that that 1st and 2nd order motion perception mechanisms are separable at some level it does not necessarily imply that there is a dedicated 2nd order mechanism. 2nd order motion perception characteristics resemble those reflected by the slower and coarser attention tracking mechanism. Similar conditions apply to colour defined motion. My NSERC programme will address these issues by adopting novel paradigms combining both compensation for non-linearities that may generate luminance artefacts and simultaneously challenge the tracking mechanism using "crowding". When spatial features are too close to one another, it becomes difficult for the visual system to perceive them although they can be easily seen in isolation and crowding has been shown to be caused by an inability to attend to the stimulus, not to the spatial resolution of the visual system. Motion information in our surrounding is not limited to isolated moving patches of information as described above. Rather we are bombarded with moving information of various speeds and sources and we must integrate this efficiently. For this reason we will use more complex dynamic stimuli where the attention tracking motion mechanisms are highly solicited. Furthermore, perceiving motion in complex environments is rarely accomplished in isolation. Normally we are standing or processing other information simultaneously. Our previous studies have shown that even a simple combined activity such as maintaining balance can influence our ability to process and learn a complex motion task. The other portion of the research programme will address these issues to build a better understanding of how our processing of dynamic stimuli changes with these additional demands. Together, these series of experiments will enrich our comprehension of how we process motion of different types from the most basic level to more life-like complex multitasking conditions.**