title: Powerful motion illusion caused by temporal asymmetries in ON and OFF visual pathways.
abstract: Successive presentations of Glass patterns (randomly positioned pairs of dots oriented in a coherent pattern) create a strong sense of global motion along the orientation of the pattern, but ambiguous in direction. Here we report that dynamic "anti-Glass" patterns, created by successive pairs of globally structured pairs of opposite polarity, create an even more powerful motion illusion that is unambiguous in direction: the dark dots always move toward the light. The motion can be cancelled and reversed by introducing a real delay in the presentation of the light dots, suggesting that the effective stimulation of the light is about 3 ms faster than the dark dots. The most plausible explanation for this is that human on channels are faster than off channels, as has been shown in the macaque.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Florence, Via San Niccolò 89, Florence 50125, Italy.
authors.forename: Maria Michela
authors.initials: MM
authors.lastname: Del Viva
authors.forename: Monica
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Gori
authors.forename: David C
authors.initials: DC
authors.lastname: Burr
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007088:Illusions / Q000502:physiology*; D009038:Motion; D009039:Motion Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D013997:Time Factors; D014795:Visual Pathways / Q000502:physiology*