Researchers at the Institute for Neuroscience and Center for Perceptual Systems have managed to locate the area of the brain that is responsible for processing 3D Motion information, and surprisingly it’s an area previously thought only responsible for 2D motion.
“Our research suggests that a large set of rich and important functions related to 3-D motion perception may have been previously overlooked in MT+,” says Alexander Huk, assistant professor of neurobiology. “Given how much we already know about MT+, this research gives us strong clues about how the brain processes 3-D motion.”
For the study, Huk and his colleagues had people watch 3-D visualizations while lying motionless for one or two hours in an MRI scanner fitted with a customized stereovision projection system.
So why is this important? This sums it up nicely:
“Who cares if the tiger or the spear is going from side to side?” says Lawrence Cormack, associate professor of psychology. “The most important kind of motion you can see is something coming at you, and this critical process has been elusive to us. Now we are beginning to understand where it occurs in the brain.”
The work was published in the July 7th issue of Nature Neuroscience .
