The macaque medial superior temporal area (MST) is proposed to be specialized for analyzing complex 'optic flow' information. Such space-varying motion patterns provide a rich source of information about self motion, scene structure and object shape. We report the performance of rhesus macaques on a two-alternative 'heading' task, in which they reported whether horizontally varying, simulated t...

Humans are usually accurate when estimating heading or path from optic flow, even in the presence of independently moving objects (IMOs) in an otherwise rigid scene. To invoke significant biases in perceived heading, IMOs have to be large and obscure the focus of expansion (FOE) in the image plane, which is the point of approach. For the estimation of path during curvilinear self-motion no sign...

Previous studies of heading perception suggest that human observers employ spatiotemporal pooling to accommodate noise in optic flow stimuli. Here, we investigated how spatial and temporal integration mechanisms are used for judgments of heading through a psychophysical experiment involving three different types of noise. Furthermore, we developed two ideal observer models to study the componen...

Principal component analysis (PCA)-based approach for user heading estimation using a smartphone in the pocket suffers from an inaccurate estimation of device attitude, which plays a central role in both obtaining acceleration signals in the horizontal plane and the ultimate global walking direction extraction. To solve this problem, we propose a novel heading estimation approach based on two u...

QTLs for heading date of rice (Oryza sativa L.) with additive, epistatic, and QTL x environment (QE) interaction effects were studied using a mixed-model-based composite interval mapping (MCIM) method and a double haploid (DH) population derived from IR64/Azucena in two crop seasons. Fourteen QTLs conferring heading date in rice, which were distributed on ten chromosomes except for chromosomes ...

The photoperiodic response is one of the most important factors determining heading date in rice (Oryza sativa). Although rhythmic expression patterns of flowering time genes have been reported to fine-tune the photoperiodic response, posttranslational regulation of key flowering regulators has seldom been elucidated in rice. Heading date 1 (Hd1) encodes a zinc finger transcription factor that ...

This paper describes a new sun sensor for absolute heading detection developed for the Field Integrated, Design and Operations (FIDO) rover. The FIDO rover is an advanced technology rover that is a terrestrial prototype of the rovers NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) plans to send to Mars in 2003. Our goal was to develop a sun sensor that fills the current cost/performance gap, uses the powe...

The ability to encode and update representations of heading direction is crucial for successful navigation. In rats, head-direction cells located within the limbic system alter their firing rate in accordance with the animal's current heading. To date, however, the neural structures that underlie an allocentric or viewpoint-independent sense of direction in humans remain unknown. Here we used f...

Navigation requires real-time heading estimation based-on self-movement cues from optic flow and object motion. We presented a simulated heading discrimination task to young, middle-aged and older adult, normal, control subjects and to patients with mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's disease. Age-related decline and neurodegenerative disease effects were evident on a battery of neuropsych...

When a person moves in a straight line through a stationary environment, the images of object surfaces move in a radial pattern away from a single point. This point, known as the focus of expansion (FOE), corresponds to the person's direction of motion. People judge their heading from image motion quite well in this situation. They perform most accurately when they can see the region around the...