The role of the ventral intraparietal area (VIP/pVIP) in the perception of object-motion and self-motion

Retinal image motion is a composite signal that contains information about two behaviourally significant factors: self-motion and the movement of environmental objects. It is thought that the brain separates the two relevant signals, and although multiple brain regions have been identified that respond selectively to the composite optic flow signal, which brain region(s) perform the parsing process remains unknown. Here, we present original evidence that the putative human ventral intraparietal area (pVIP), a region known to receive optic flow signals as well as independent self-motion signals from other sensory modalities, plays a critical role in the parsing process and acts to isolate object-motion. We localised pVIP using its multisensory response profile, and then tested its relative responses to simulated object-motion and self-motion stimuli; results indicated that responses were much stronger in pVIP to stimuli that specified object-motion. We report two further observations that will be significant for the future direction of research in this area; firstly, activation in pVIP was suppressed by distant stationary objects compared to the absence of objects or closer objects. Secondly, we describe several other brain regions that share with pVIP selectivity for visual object-motion over visual self-motion as well as a multisensory response. •Replicating a previous study, we localisedputative human ventral intraparietal area (pVIP) via its multisensory response.•The replication was successful except with respect to auditory responses.•The pVIP region is activated more strongly by perception of moving objects than selfmotion.•We localised several more brain regions that with both multisensory responses andstronger responses toobject than self-motion.•We observed that when stationary objects are present during self-motion, distant ones inhibit pVIP activation.