Introduction Blind individuals tend to show better performance than sighted individuals on a variety of auditory and tactile tasks. This is thought to be due both to compensatory hypertrophy – enhanced neuronal processing within auditory and somatosensory cortices, and to…
The vision of newborn infants is crude. As infants experience the normal visual environment, their vision rapidly improves with different visual capabilities emerging at different ages. Determining the exact timing for the behavioral onset of specific visual functions and identifying…
The dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus (dLGN) is the gateway through which visual information is transmitted from the retina to the cortex; therefore, visual perception relies on the ability of dLGN neurons to faithfully relay the specific features…
The limited behavioral repertoire of the infant and the impossibility of instructing the test subject have made it necessary for vision scientists interested in human visual development to adapt the classical methods of psychophysics and electrophysiology for use with infants…
Our visual perception arises from the interpretation of light information, which varies in space, wavelength, and time. It is the latter of these attributes that is explored in this chapter. Subjectively, the world appears to be stable despite continuous changes…
Introduction Humans and other animals with frontally located eyes attain binocular vision from the two retinal images through a series of sensory and motor processes that culminate in the perception of singleness and stereoscopic depth. Keen stereopsis is considered the…
Introduction Perimetry and visual field testing have been used as diagnostic procedures for evaluation of visual function for nearly 200 years, and a historical review of these techniques may be found in several publications. During this period of time, a…
The ability to perceive color is a highly valued sensory capacity, and it has been a subject of experimental inquiry for over 200 years. Prior to the development of modern biological techniques, breakthroughs in color vision research stemmed from careful…
Visual acuity is a measure of the keenness of sight. The Egyptians used the ability to distinguish double stars as a measure of visual acuity more than 5000 years ago. Over the centuries visual acuity has been studied, measured and…
Introduction Vision is our most developed sense and unsurprisingly a substantial amount of brain processing is devoted to it, with over half the primate brain involved in vision-related processing. A first step in understanding the nature of this processing involves…