Visual space from visual motion: turn integration in tethered flying Drosophila.
(33/1103)
Organisms navigating by path integration need to continuously measure their forward movement and their angular orientation with respect to an external reference. How they do it is little understood. Tethered flies at the flight simulator "navigate" in an artificial visual landscape without forward movement. They can return to a previously held orientation if the panorama provides a singularity (landmark) as reference. Surprisingly, in a regularly striped drum without singularities, they can use a temporal cue instead. In this experiment the arena is illuminated with only one color that is either green or blue. The arena is virtually divided into four quadrants. Whenever a quadrant boundary moves past an arbitrary point, the color of the arena light changes. When a fly is heated with one color it acquires a preference for the other one. Subsequently, it avoids the borders toward the potentially 'hot' quadrants even without touching them. The only way to achieve this is by turn integration, that is, by adding and subtracting all the turns it performs once it crosses the border. The color switch defining the border crossing resets the turn integrator, using the orientation of the arena at this moment as reference. In contrast, landmarks or, if it were available, the skylight compass enable the fly to establish by pattern learning any orientation as a reference. If the reference orientation coincides with the desired orientation, that is, if the animal stores the pattern while being oriented toward the goal, it can maintain its orientation without recourse to turn integration (which may be error prone). (+info)
Invariance of the perceived spatial frequency shift of peripherally viewed gratings with manipulations of contrast, duration, and luminance.
(34/1103)
Gratings appear of higher spatial frequency when they are viewed peripherally rather than foveally. To test the hypothesis that this effect is an artefact of particular laboratory conditions, we manipulated the contrast, luminance and presentation duration, manipulations which have also been shown to increase the apparent spatial frequency of foveally presented gratings. It has been argued that such shifts reflect an attempt to increase sensitivity by changing the receptive field properties of spatially tuned visual channels, while keeping their size labels constant. If so, and peripheral channels are not otherwise mislabelled, it should be possible to find conditions under which the apparent spatial frequency of peripherally viewed gratings matches that of foveal gratings of the same spatial frequency. In this study, manipulations of contrast, luminance, and duration had no effect on the size of the perceived spatial frequency shift in peripheral vision. Thus the putative inappropriate size labelling of peripheral visual channels is constant over a wide range of stimulus values. We speculate that this apparent constant error may result from a mechanism which normally compensates for another factor such as blur, which may otherwise lead to an overestimation of size. (+info)
Larger effect of aging on the perception of higher-order stimuli.
(35/1103)
Widespread deficits are known to accompany normal aging. Contrast thresholds of older and younger observers were measured for static and drifting gratings defined by luminance (first-order) or by contrast (second-order), and for a temporally segmented second-order motion stimulus. Results showed that older individuals had a larger threshold elevation for the perception of second-order stimuli than for the perception of first-order stimuli. This suggests a dissociation between the mechanisms underlying the perception of first and second-order stimuli, and demonstrates that aging may affect the more numerous processing steps required for the analysis of higher level stimuli. (+info)
Spatial summation of blue-on-yellow light increments and decrements in human vision.
(36/1103)
In the primate retina, blue-OFF cells are less numerous than blue-ON cells but no psychophysical equivalent of this asymmetry has been found so far. The hypothesis put forward in the present study is that the ON-OFF asymmetry should manifest itself in the size and effectiveness of spatial summation of S-cone signals of opposite polarity. To test this hypothesis upon selective stimulation of the S-cones in man, a 3 cd/m(2) blue light was superimposed on a 300 cd/m(2) yellow background and the test stimulus consisted in a luminance increment or decrement of the blue light from its steady level over a circular area of variable size. The test stimuli were presented at 12.5 degrees retinal eccentricity. Within the test-stimulus spectral band, sensitivity was that of Stiles' pi(1) mechanism. Increasing stimulus area reduced more the decrement threshold than the increment threshold, and Ricco's area was larger for luminance decrements (0.8-2 degrees ) than for increments (0.6-0.9 degrees ). Experiments with red-on-red stimuli confirmed that the large summation area and stimulus-polarity-dependent spatial summation are specific for the isolated S-cone signals. The sign-dependency of spatial summation is probably a psychophysical correlate of the asymmetry of the ON- and OFF- visual pathways receiving S-cone input. (+info)
Transient enhancing of cone electroretinograms following exposure to brighter photopic backgrounds.
(37/1103)
Normal subjects were first light adapted to a standard photopic background and a control photopic ERG was obtained. The subjects were then light adapted to a brighter background for 5 min at the end of which the luminance was returned to the control background and ERGs were taken at regular intervals. Most of the ERG/OP components were transiently enhanced following the above procedure. Given that the previously reported photopic light adaptation effect occurred following an increase in the luminance of the adapting field (from dark adaptation to light adaptation) while that reported in the present study is triggered following a decrease in the level of light adaptation, the opposite effects noted might suggest that the two retinal events result from the same, not yet identified, cone adaptation mechanisms which are solicited in an opposite way. (+info)
Infant color vision: sharp chromatic edges are not required for chromatic discrimination in 4-month-olds.
(38/1103)
In our previous demonstrations of chromatic discrimination in infants, we have used test and surround fields of different chromaticities that abutted each other at sharp chromatic edges. In order to see whether sharp chromatic edges are necessary for infants to make chromatic discriminations, 16-week-old infants were tested with three stimulus configurations in which sharp chromatic edges were eliminated. The three edge manipulations involved black borders, a dark surround, or blurred edges around the chromatic test field. In each case red, green, and violet test fields were used. Although performance decreased when sharp chromatic edges were eliminated, observers' percent correct scores remained clearly above chance for eight of the nine discriminations (three colors x three edge manipulations). We argue that all three edge manipulations reduce the likelihood of mediation of chromatic discrimination by M (magnocellular) cells. These data thus provide evidence that young infants have functional P (parvocellular) pathways, and use them for making chromatic discriminations. (+info)
Luminance spatial frequency differences facilitate the segmentation of superimposed textures.
(39/1103)
Do superimposed textures segregate on the basis of a difference in their luminance spatial frequency? We addressed this question using orientation-gratings, which consist of dense arrays of Gabor micropatterns whose orientations vary sinusoidally across space. Two orientation gratings of the same texture spatial frequency were combined in anti-phase, to produce a 'dual-modulation' orientation grating. Thresholds for detecting the dual-modulation gratings were measured as a function of the difference in Gabor spatial frequency between the two grating components. When the two components were made from the same Gabors, thresholds were relatively high. However a one octave difference in Gabor spatial frequency between the components caused thresholds to fall close to those of single-modulation orientation gratings. The fall in threshold was accompanied by a change in appearance of the stimulus; to that of two transparent, interwoven, flow patterns. We show that these results are incompatible with current Filter-Rectify-Filter models of 'second-order' pattern detection. Rather, they favour the idea that feature analysis precedes texture analysis, with the visual system encoding local orientation content prior to the texture stage. (+info)
Computational modelling of interleaved first- and second-order motion sequences and translating 3f+4f beat patterns.
(40/1103)
Despite detailed psychophysical, neurophysiological and electrophysiological investigation, the number and nature of independent and parallel motion processing mechanisms in the visual cortex remains controversial. Here we use computational modelling to evaluate evidence from two psychophysical studies collectively thought to demonstrate the existence of three separate and independent motion processing channels. We show that the pattern of psychophysical results can largely be accounted for by a single mechanism. The results demonstrate that a low-level luminance based approach can potentially provide a wider account of human motion processing than generally thought possible. (+info)