Impairment of the perception of second order motion but not first order motion in a patient with unilateral focal brain damage

Unlike first order motion, which is based on spatiotemporal variations in luminance, second-order motion relies on spatiotemporal variation of attributes derived from luminance, such as contrast. Here we show that a patient with a small unilateral cortical lesion adjacent to human cortical area MT (V5) has an apparently permanent disorder in perceiving several forms of second-order but not first-order motion in his contralateral visual field. This result indicates that separate pathways for motion perception exist, either as divergent pathways from area MT or even from primary visual cortex, or as separate pathways from subcortical areas to extrastriate visual areas.