Abstract
Measurement of isometric neck torque of the locust, in response to small sinusoidal motion of visual test patterns with large stripes, shows that displacements of 20 seconds of arc are perceived by the eye. On the other hand, when stripe size is varied, the eye seems not to resolve much detail since no response is elicited by patterns with spatial period less than 3°. It is shown that these two results are not incompatible.
Current procedures for comparing geometrical interference phenomena in visual reflexes with the receptor spatial sampling relevant to motion perception are extended to treat the small-signal locust experiment, and shown in general to involve larger confidence limits than usually supposed. Especially, arbitrarily weighted contributions from several ommatidial pair-types in the hexagonal lattice are permissible. Finally, consideration of the effects of receptor and other series nonlinearities on motion-perception experiments of this kind predicts particular test patterns for which visual responses should depend upon phase relations of superposed Fourier spatial components, whether the events of receptor interaction involve correlation or not.
Measured effects on the reflex of pattern luminance, contrast, displacement and spatial period form a basis for the small-signal frequency analysis described in the paper which follows this one.
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Thorson, J. Small-signal analysis of a visual reflex in the locust. Kybernetik 3, 41–53 (1966). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00299897
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00299897