Sunao Iwaki1, John W. Belliveau2
1National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Ikeda, Osaka, Japan; 2Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA
Two-dimensional optic flow is a strong cue to reconstruct the shape of the 3D object in motion. Here, we parametrically controlled the coherence of the random-dot motion to elucidate the changes of the brain activities between different 3D perception conditions in human. Significant increases of BOLD signal were observed both in the dorsal and ventral visual pathways in the conditions which generate robust 3D precepts. The results suggest that the perception of 3-D object from 2-D motion includes both perception of global motion and 3-D mental image processing that are accomplished by cooperative activation in the two distinct visual pathways.