Selective deficit of visual search in moving displays after extrastriate damage

Abstract

A VISUAL cue that is often associated with significant stimuli, such as those provided by prey and predators, is movement relative to the observer. An efficient visual system should be able to direct attention to those parts of the visual field that contain such stimuli. What is needed is a system that can filter by movement difference. This could direct attention to a moving item among stationary items, or an item moving in one direction against a background moving in a different direction. Visual search experiments have shown that people are indeed able to filter by movement; that is, they can attend to just the moving items in arrays of moving and stationary stimuli¹. Single-cell recordings from monkey visual cortex show that the medial temporal cortical area (MT) has some of the properties required to filter by movement^2–4. We have now linked these two observations by showing that a patient with bilateral lesions to the presumed human homologue of MT cannot restrict visual attention to the moving items in arrays of both moving and stationary items. This suggests that MT is the site of a movement filter used in normal visual processing.