I wrote about the Circuitry of the Superior Colliculus on an older blogpost of mine. I'm likely to dive into the literature further but iirc the detection you're referring to results from a pretty elegant mechanism wherein the whole region is under constant rebound inhibition. If motion detectors (in other regions) sense a subject moving across the forest floor, the way this gains salience is that the Collicular neurons associated with that region of the visual field will activate themselves recurrently and inhibit the rest of the neurons. The region is laminar so there's likely to be more computational complexity than I remember, but the basis of the circuit is that it can produce "Competitive Surround" inhibition. This ability is seemingly reliant on Cholinergic and Gabaergic projections from the Colliculus' inner nuclei. Maybe some fun stuff with phasic release?
Anyways, a lot of the good literature comes from experiments on the Optic Tectum (the analogous area in birds) so the answer you seek may be there, otherwise, I think my blogpost is okay.
I wrote about the Circuitry of the Superior Colliculus on an older blogpost of mine. I'm likely to dive into the literature further but iirc the detection you're referring to results from a pretty elegant mechanism wherein the whole region is under constant rebound inhibition. If motion detectors (in other regions) sense a subject moving across the forest floor, the way this gains salience is that the Collicular neurons associated with that region of the visual field will activate themselves recurrently and inhibit the rest of the neurons. The region is laminar so there's likely to be more computational complexity than I remember, but the basis of the circuit is that it can produce "Competitive Surround" inhibition. This ability is seemingly reliant on Cholinergic and Gabaergic projections from the Colliculus' inner nuclei. Maybe some fun stuff with phasic release?
Anyways, a lot of the good literature comes from experiments on the Optic Tectum (the analogous area in birds) so the answer you seek may be there, otherwise, I think my blogpost is okay.