movement perception
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movement perception, process through which humans and other animals orient themselves to their own or others’ physical movements. Most animals, including humans, move in search of food that itself often moves; they move to avoid predators and to mate. Animals must perceive their own movements to balance themselves and to move effectively; without such perceptual functions the chances for survival would be sharply reduced.
Visual cues to movement
The eye is by far the most effective organ for sensing movement. Some animals are especially sensitive to visual stimuli that move in specific ways. For instance, electrical patterns from the eye of a frog show that some elements in the organ respond only when the stimulus is about the size of a fly moving in the insect’s range of speed. Generally the eyes of lower animals seem to respond selectively to what is of importance to survival. In these animals the eye’s retina does much of the visual processing. This is an economical arrangement since the animal tends to respond only to essential stimuli, the brain having little to do but relay signals to the motor system. It is an inflexible mechanism, however; higher animals process visual information in more elaborate ways, the brain being more heavily involved. Thus, some cells in the visual area of the cat’s brain respond only to moving stimuli, sets of movement-detector cells functioning specifically for each direction across the field of view. Features of human visual experience also suggest that movement detectors exist in the human brain.
Each retina in most higher animals has a central (foveal) zone for detailed colour and pattern vision and a surrounding peripheral zone that effectively is sensitive only to the grosser features of the outer visual field. The peripheral retina is especially sensitive to movement (often a signal of danger), which induces a reflex turning of the eyes to project the image on the fovea and permit the moving object to be recognized.
Visual stability
Mechanisms have evolved that yield stable, clear visual input despite swaying and other blurring factors. In a reflex mechanism called optokinetic nystagmus, the eyes pursue a moving scene to keep the image stationary on the retina. When they can move no farther, they snap back and pursue the scene again in a to-and-fro alternation of slow pursuit and quick return. These eye movements are readily observed in people who are looking at a moving pattern of stripes or turning their heads, this response being inhibited only when something stationary is visually fixated.
Similar nystagmic movements are triggered by impulses arising in the inner ear when the head moves. These persist even when the eyes are closed and may be felt by pressing the eyelids lightly as one rotates the whole body.
In a related stabilizing activity the eyes scan in quick jerks (saccades) with short fixations; e.g., in reading. Normally the eyes cannot move steadily over a stationary scene but make a series of stationary images (like still photographs); visual function tends to be suppressed when there is saccadic blurring. Yet the eyes can follow a steadily moving object smoothly.
When one looks from one point to another, movements of the retinal image are the same as those produced by a moving scene on a stationary eye. It might be thought that the sensory structures found in the eye muscles would provide the cues for judging whether it is the eye or the scene that has moved. Yet we see the scene as stationary only when we move our eyes voluntarily and not when they are moved passively by the finger. This suggests that motor-nerve signals inform us whether our eyes are moving, rather than the sensory structures in the eye muscles. When the eye is moved by pushing it with the finger there is no normal motor discharge to inform the brain, and changes in retinal image are perceived as movement of the scene. Indeed, people with paralyzed eye muscles experience the scene as moving when they try to move their eyes. When the motor discharge thus generated is not accompanied by the expected image motion, the person falsely perceives the scene and the eye to be moving together.
Relative visual movement
A visual field containing familiar objects provides a stable framework against which relative motion may be judged. People often report that an isolated point of light in a dark room is moving when it is not; the experience is known as autokinetic movement. It was observed in 1799 by Alexander von Humboldt while he was watching a star through a telescope, and he attributed it to movement of the star itself. Not until about 60 years later was the effect shown to be subjective, apparently arising from instability in the sense of eye position without a visual frame of reference.
Similarly, if a small object is presented in a frame with nothing else in view, movement usually is attributed to the object even when only the frame moves. This induced movement effect reflects our tendency to use the larger surround as a stable frame of reference. Recall the illusion that your train is moving when it is really the moving train alongside that, seen through the window, is falsely accepted as the frame of reference.
People cannot perceive very slow movement; below a minimum speed (about that of the minute hand on a watch) movements become imperceptible and can only be inferred (as in remembering the previous position of the hour hand). At high speeds, one perceives a blurred streak rather than a definite object in motion.
Movement aftereffect
When a parade is interrupted after some minutes, the pavement may seem to move in the opposite direction to the marchers who have passed. Phenomena similar to this movement aftereffect occur in other senses. For instance, after disembarking, a sailor feels the land to be rolling like a ship as the result of kinesthetic and vestibular aftereffects. The visual movement aftereffect probably arises when movement detectors in the brain that respond to the original direction of motion become fatigued, leaving predominant those detectors that respond to contrary movement.