Different motion sensitive units are involved in recovering the direction of moving lines.

We studied direction discrimination for lines moving obliquely relative to their orientation. Manipulating contrast, length and duration of motion, we found systematic errors in direction discrimination at low contrast, long length and/or short durations. These errors can be accounted for by a competition between ambiguous velocity signals originating from contour motion processing units and signals from line terminator processing units. The dynamic of this competition can be described by a simple model involving two different classes of processing units with different contrast thresholds, different integration time constants and different levels of response saturation.