Impaired visual motion perception in the contralateral hemifield following unilateral posterior cerebral lesions in humans

Summary: Contrast thresholds for a number of tasks were measured in the contralateral and ipsilateral upper quadrants of the visual field (eccentricity = 10°) before and after an occipito-parietal surgical resection, in one patient, carried out for intractable epilepsy. Postoperatively the contrast thresholds for discriminating the speed of movement of drifting sine-wave gratings were elevated by greater than a log unit in the contralateral field with little or no change in the detection thresholds for the same stimuli. Contrast thresholds for opposite direction-of-motion (DOM) discrimination of a contrast modulated (CMod) grating (a 'non-Fourier' motion stimulus) were also elevated by about a log unit in the contralateral hemifield but thresholds for DOM discrimination of a sine-wave (luminance modulated, LMod) grating were unaffected. Contrast thresholds for orientation discrimination of stationary gratings (a non-motion task) were unaffected. This general pattern of results was found in two other patients following lateral occipital surgical resections. Eight other patients with occipito-temporal (two cases), parietal (three cases) and medial occipital lobe lesions (three cases) showed no difference between the two hemifields on any of the tasks. Comparison of the location of the lesions leads to the conclusion that damage to the lateral occipital gyri is responsible for the pattern of visual deficit observed. Damage to an extra-striate visual area concerned with motion perception (the human homologue of primate V5-MT) may have occurred. There has been no previous description of impairment of motion perception localized to a hemifield in humans. The characteristics of the residual motion perception in these cases is described further in the accompanying article [Plant and Nakayama (1993), Brain, 116, 1337-1353].