Animal Motion Perception

Most animals move around in their environment, and through evolutionary time, this has resulted in specializations in their sensory systems and brains, to detect motion, as described in this entry. These patterns of movement can occur as moving images in vision, as moving sounds in hearing, and as moving tactile patterns in touch. Visual motion can be simply divided into two classes; the first, called object motion, is produced when some object moves relative to stationary objects in the world. The second class of motion, called self-motion, is produced by the observing animal itself moving its body, head, or eyes and thereby creating movement of the entire image across its visual field.

Although visual object motion can be produced by nonliving things such as rain, ...