Motion integration

Since the pioneering work of the Hubel and Wiesel, the visual system is mostly conceived as a feed-forward hierarchical flow of sensory information. Accordingly, low-level visual information (such as position and orientation) is extracted locally within stationary receptive fields and is rapidly cascaded to downstream areas to encode more complex features. Such a framework implies that processing at each level of processing must be fast, efficient and mostly confined to network of neurons with overlapping receptive fields. In recent work, however, we have demonstrated that any local stationary stimulus is, in itself, generating waves propagating within each cortical steps of visual processing. Visual information thus does not stay confined to a particular retinotopic location but instead invades neighboring cortical territory, connecting neurons with neighboring receptive fields. What could be the computational advantage of cortical waves in the processing visual information? We have shown that, in response to a non-stationary sequence of visual stimuli, such as an object moving along a trajectory, these waves interact non-linearly with feedforward and feedback streams. They hereby shape the representation of moving stimuli within cortical retinotopic maps to encode accurately the object velocity.