Decoding the motion aftereffect in human visual cortex

Abstract

In the motion aftereffect (MAE), adapting to a moving stimulus causes a subsequently presented stationary stimulus to appear to move in the opposite direction. Recently, the neural basis of the motion aftereffect has received considerable interest, and a number of brain areas have been implicated in the generation of the illusory motion. Here, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging in combination with multivariate pattern classification to directly compare the neural activity evoked during the observation of both real and illusory motions. We show that the perceived illusory motion is not encoded in the same way as real motion in the same direction. Instead, suppression of the adapted ..