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Powerful Motion Illusion Caused by Temporal Asymmetries in ON and OFF Visual Pathways

¹Department of Psychology, University of Florence, Florence; and ²Istituto di Neuroscienze del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Pisa, Italy

Submitted 19 December 2005; accepted in final form 17 February 2006

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.