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- Volume 1, 2015
Annual Review of Vision Science - Volume 1, 2015
Volume 1, 2015
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Control and Functions of Fixational Eye Movements
Vol. 1 (2015), pp. 499–518More LessHumans and other species explore a visual scene by making rapid eye movements (saccades) two to three times every second. Although the eyes may appear immobile in the brief intervals between saccades, microscopic (fixational) eye movements are always present, even when an observer is attending to a single point. These movements occur during the very periods in which visual information is acquired and processed, and their functions have long been debated. Recent technical advances in controlling retinal stimulation during normal oculomotor activity have shed new light on the visual contributions of fixational eye movements and the degree to which these movements can be controlled. The emerging body of evidence, reviewed in this article, indicates that fixational eye movements are important components of the strategy by which the visual system processes fine spatial details; they enable both precise positioning of the stimulus on the retina and encoding of spatial information into the joint space–time domain.
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Color and the Cone Mosaic
Vol. 1 (2015), pp. 519–546More LessVision is limited by the measurements taken by the cone photoreceptors. To provide useful perceptual representations, the brain must go beyond the measurements and make inferences about the scene being viewed. This article considers the first stages of spatiochromatic vision. We show how spatial and chromatic information become intertwined by the optics of the eye and because of the structure of the retinal cone mosaic, and we consider the consequent implications for perception. Because there is at most one cone at each retinal location, the standard treatment of human trichromacy does not apply at fine spatial scales. Rather, trichromacy results from a perceptual inference based on measurements from cones of different classes at different locations. Our treatment emphasizes linking physics, biology, and computation with the goal of providing a framework for a larger understanding of how the brain interprets photoreceptor excitations to see objects and their properties.
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Visual Adaptation
Vol. 1 (2015), pp. 547–567More LessSensory systems continuously mold themselves to the widely varying contexts in which they must operate. Studies of these adaptations have played a long and central role in vision science, partly because the specific adaptations remain a powerful tool for dissecting vision by exposing the mechanisms that are adapting. That is, “if it adapts, it's there.” Many insights about vision have come from this use of adaptation, as a method. A second important trend has been the realization that the processes of adaptation are themselves essential to how vision works and thus likely operate at all levels. That is, “if it's there, it adapts.” This observation has focused interest on the mechanisms of adaptation as the target rather than the probe. Together, these approaches have led to an emerging view of adaptation as a fundamental and ubiquitous coding strategy impacting all aspects of how we see.
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Development of Three-Dimensional Perception in Human Infants
Vol. 1 (2015), pp. 569–594More LessThe play of light on the retina contains multiple sources of information about the three-dimensional (3D) structure of the world. Some of the best information is derived from differencing operations that act on the images that result from the two eyes’ laterally displaced vantage points. Other information is available in systematic retinal patterns of local texture and motion cues. This article describes what is currently known about the development of sensitivity to these binocular and monocular cues for depth in human infants, and it places the results in the context of what is known about the underlying neural mechanisms from work in nonhuman primates and human neuroimaging studies.
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