Barn Owl (IMAGE) Society for Neuroscience Caption This montage illustrates a barn owl (Tyto alba) watching a monitor displaying a paradigm which tests behavioral and neural responses to figure-ground segregation. The paradigm consists of a target dot appearing inside the borders of the site's receptive field (figure, represented by the dashed red circle), and moving to the right (denoted by the gray arrow), surrounded by dots-array (ground). The colors of the arrows represent 3 types of movement tested: (1) magenta relates to condition where 100% of the circles moved 1350 upwards; (2) green relates to condition where 70% of the circles moved 1350 upwards; (3) blue relates to condition where 50% of the circles moved 1350 upwards. In behaving barn owls the coherency of the background motion modulates the perceived saliency of the target object, and in complementary multi-unit recordings in the Optic Tectum, the neural responses were more sensitive to the homogeneity of the background motion than to motion-direction contrasts between the receptive field and the surround. Credit Yoram Gutfreund Usage Restrictions None License Licensed content Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.