Adaptation characteristics of steady-state motion visual evoked potentials

Objective: Motion visual evoked potentials (motion VEPs) are used in clinical diagnosis and basic research. Employing steady-state rather than the usual transient motion VEPs simplifies statistical evaluation and might drastically reduce examination durations. Protocols for recording transient motion-onset VEPs usually involve fairly long recovery intervals between trials to avoid neural adaptation. This is not feasible for steady-state VEPs. We investigated how adaptation affects the steady-state motion VEP. Methods: Oscillatory (13.3 rev/s) and continuous uni-directional random-dot motion served as adaptation stimuli. Steady-state motion VEPs and, for comparison, transient motion VEPs were recorded. Results: In the first experiment, we investigated how adaptation affects the recordings. Contrary to our expectation, we did not find any sizable effect. However, there was a large inter-individual variability in steady-state amplitude and no correlation across subjects between transient and steady-state amplitude. In the second experiment, we confirmed that the steady-state VEP reflects veridical motion processing by assessing its susceptibility to uni-directional pre-adaptation. Conclusions: Taken together, the results suggest that steady-state motion VEPs provide a fast method of recording motion responses without suffering from adaptation, but at the expense of inter-individual reproducibility.