Revisiting motion repulsion: evidence for a general phenomenon?

Previous studies have found large misperceptions when subjects are reporting the perceived angle between two directions of motion moving transparently at an acute angle, the so called motion repulsion. While these errors have been assumed to be caused by interactions between the two directions present, we reassessed these earlier measurements taking into account recent findings about directional misperceptions affecting the perception of single motion (reference repulsion). While our measurements confirm that errors in directional judgements of transparent motions can indeed be as big as 22° we find that motion repulsion, i.e. the interaction between two directions, contributes at most about 7° to these errors. This value is comparable to similar repulsion effects in orientation perception and stereoscopic depth perception, suggesting that they share a common neural basis. Our data further suggest that fast time scale adaptation and/or more general interactions between neurons contribute to motion repulsion while tracking eye movements play little or no role. These findings should serve as important constraints for models of motion perception.