One major area of research in the Gilden lab concerns how we are limited in our ability to attend to motion direction. We have conducted a number of studies that provide support for the idea that it is inherently difficult to sense rotation direction when there are multiple rotating objects. This deficit for rotary motion stands in contrast to the facility with which translation direction is sensed (e.g. left-right displacement). In the movie shown below there are 4 disks rotating in depth. With ample viewing time observers are able to sense the single disk that rotates in a distinct direction. However, finding this "oddball" is difficult because we have an inherently harder time attending to multiple sources of rotation. In recent work we have sought to discriminate whether the sensing of rotation direction is a SERIAL process (individual rotations are sensed on a one-at-a-time basis), or a PARALLEL, limited-capacity process (all rotations are sensed simultaneously, though the sensing of each rotation is slowed). The particular motion stimulus depicted here is part of related work that seeks to understand whether the attentional limitations we have found for rotations in the plane extend to rotations in depth.

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