THE PERCEPTION OF FORM AND MOTION

Although form and motion are two distinct aspects of visual processing, they do not start as separate entities in the visual system. Early analyses extract discontinuities in various image attributes and these can trace the outline of a form. When displaced, the same image features can give rise to impressions of motion. Recent work has overturned many of the assumptions about the contributions of different stimulus attributes to motion processing, and reorganized the classification of motion systems. The results have revealed unexpected interactions between attention and motion. Paralleling this research is work on the early stages of form learning and on the nature of the stored representations.