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... (read more)
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... (read more)