We first checked performance on the attention task and found that all participants attended to fixation, with an average error of 12 blues counted on a range of number of blues that varied from 42 to 149. The response amplitudes were averaged across hemispheres for each participant and the mean over participants is plotted in
Figure 2. There is some variability in amplitudes of BOLD responses across participants as shown by the error bars in
Figure 2, but we can use repeated measures statistical tests to look for common patterns across conditions. Stimulus density affected the hemodynamic responses in all the ROIs, with a more dense stimulus producing a higher response, although in MST this is not quite significant, repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) on percentage signal change main effect of density, V1:
F(6, 36) = 16.1,
p < 0.0005; MT:
F(6, 36) = 2.47,
p < 0.05; MST:
F(6, 36) = 2.53,
p < 0.05—however, the MST data failed the test for sphericity and with Greenhouse-Geisler correction
p = 0.13. Although motion density affected area V1, the motion stimuli did not produce any response above baseline in V1 until we used 64 apertures, with a significant increase from the smallest to largest number of apertures, planned simple contrast: 1 versus 128 apertures
F(1.6) = 20.6,
p < 0.005, post-hoc univariate
t test 1 aperture against zero response
t(6) = −2.18,
p = 0.07. In fact at a low number of apertures there appears to be a negative BOLD response, although this is not significant. By contrast, both area MT and MST showed a significant difference from the baseline even when a single aperture was presented and no significant difference between the smallest and largest number of apertures, MT planned simple contrast: 1 versus 128 apertures
F(1.6) = 3.11,
p = 0.13, post-hoc univariate
t test 1 aperture against zero response
t(6) = 5.56,
p < 0.005; MST planned simple contrast: 1 versus 128 apertures
F(1.6) = 0.40,
p = 0.55, post-hoc univariate
t test 1 aperture against zero response
t(6) = 3.98,
p < 0.01.