Motion perception under mesopic vision

Mesopic and scotopic vision extend over an illuminance range of 10(6). The goal of the present study was to determine the effect of decreasing light level on the underlying motion mechanism that integrates spatiotemporally separated motion signals. To accomplish this, we took advantage of the phenomenon of visual motion priming, in which the perceived direction of a directionally ambiguous test stimulus is influenced by the directional movement of a preceding priming stimulus. After terminating a drifting priming stimulus, a 180 degrees phase-shifted grating was presented as a test stimulus. The priming and test stimuli were separately presented to the central and peripheral retinas, respectively. The participants judged the perceived direction of this test stimulus at various light levels from photopic to scotopic levels. We found that the effects of motion priming disappeared over 1 log unit of mesopic light levels. When the test stimulus was presented before the offset of the priming stimulus to compensate for the temporal delay in the rod pathway or when both stimuli were presented at the same location in the periphery, a motion-priming effect appeared at mesopic light levels. These results suggest that different temporal characteristics between the cone pathway and rod pathway disturb the function of the putative motion mechanism responsible for the spatiotemporal integration of motion signals, which leads to specific modulation of motion perception over a wide range of mesopic vision.