A deeply moving experience

This week we covered both depth and motion perception. Bad joke #3 (at least for this week) is the title of this blog. I hope you come up with more clever things to say about these topics! Some questions for your consideration:

1. Pre-renaissance artists had trouble with depicting depth in their paintings. Can you find some examples of this? How did their paintings fail to depict depth? What aspects of a painting give it depth?

2. When you focus on a point in space, the objects that lay either in front of or in back of your point of fixation appear as two images. Why?

3. It seems that to have more than one brain area responsible for the processing of motion information is redundant. Why types of motion information is processed in what areas and what do you get for having different areas process different types of motion information?

4. What is the aperture problem?

Looks like you better turn of your apparent motion entertainment and get writing in order to appreciate that art form!

Color me silly

This week’s class discussion sure was colorful!  For your blog entry this week, consider some of the following topics for discussion:

1.  Why did John Keats lament Newton’s “unweaving of the rainbow”?  Do you also lament this unweaving?

2.  What is the difference between adding and subtracting colors?  What does that even mean?

3. What does the condition of synesthia tell us about “normal” sensory processing?  What do you imagine it is like to have this condition?

4.  Do people with color blindness see the same way as those with “normal” color vision?  In what ways do they perceive the world differently?  For that matter, how can we tell if anyone’s visual world is similar to our own?

I look forward to your colorful thoughts on these questions!

Developmentally speaking

This week we talked about visual development.  Some questions for this week’s blog are:

1. How does the nature versus nurture debate come into play in the development of a normal visual system?

2.  What are the behavioral consequences of an under-developed or abnormally developed visual system?

3.  Why do you think there are so many areas of cortex devoted to the processing of different types of visual information?

As I see it, you’ve got some writing to  do!

So much information, so little attention

The visual world is a complicated place. There’s so much information in the visual scene to process; our brains sure do a lot of work! For this week’s blog entries, contemplate on just how busy the brain is every time you open your eyes.

1. A single complex visual scene can be decomposed into multiple levels of spatial frequency. What kind of information can one extract at different spatial frequencies?

2. Sometimes, if we are not paying attention to objects within our visual field, we can fail to notice some very strange things (click here, here, and here for some demos). Describe a situation in which you exhibited change blindness or inattentional blindness. (Hint: movies help people fall prey to these blindnesses often).

3. What can studies on facial recognition tell us about object recognition? Are faces objects?

4. Why are gratings such popular stimuli in studying visual perception?

Open your eyes, and get typing!

P.S. For more information of the image shown in this post, click HERE.

My! What big cortical areas you have!

So many interesting posts this week!

Marion wrote a poem describing the visual pathway and Caroline wrote a poem dissecting the various meanings of the word vision. Jay also wrote about the differences between vision and visual perception.

Many of you wrote about the consequences of cortical magnification. Joe used soldiers and flies to talk about the good and bad of cortical magnification. Jessica went one step further and wrote about the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Some of you took topics discussed in class and did some more research on the topic. Hankyu wrote about the oblique effect, Cameron wrote about split brain research (with a youtube link), Jon wrote of the necker cube illusion and Katie wrote about monoculer versus binoculer vision. And speaking of monocular vision, Justen almost gave me a heart attack when he mentioned driving with the eye patch on!

Swati wrote about how some visual disorders are misdiagnosed as other disorders such as ADHD. Priya wrote about how Vision Therapy might help with some people with autism. Karthik wrote about some research he’s involved in concerning infant perception. Spencer wrote about some research on visual field mapping and your blindspot while Mike took Easter as the inspiration behind his blog entry and wrote about the visual fields of rabbits. And speaking of holidays, Dawn wondered if the duplex theory of vision skewed her perception that more people were wearing green at night versus during the day on St Patrick’s Day.

More information about the cool movie in this post can be found HERE.

Edge detection and then some

This week we moved beyond the optic nerve and into the cortex! Some topics for this week’s blog entry include:

1. Why and how is the retinal processing of visual information different from the cortical processing of that same information?

2. What are some consequences of the duplex solution of vision?

3. How can we use the oblique effect to study the organization of visual information?

4.  What is cortical magnification and is it a good or bad thing?

As your fingers fly over the keyboard, think about all the processing your visual system is doing to discriminate between your ‘O’s and ‘N’s.  You think you’re tired?  How do you think the neurons within your visual pathway are feeling?

Movies, TV, animals, and the eye

Well, well. Blog entries this week were certainly more than meets the computer! (Okay, I know, it’s a bad joke.)

Sean sure does love the transformers and has some prose and a U Tube video to back it up. Caroline took a different approach and wrote about the transformation between what you see and what you perceive.

Sam wrote about Carpenter’s quote and how our vision is limited by the physical aspects our of eyes. Neelam wondered what Carpenter’s take would be on Leary’s position that drugs can help free us from being slaves to our visual system.

Josh compared human eyes to other types of eyes. Rachel wrote about “eye spots”, as did Jeff who included an interesting photo of the “Earth’s eye”.

Finally, a timely piece written by Marion may help you to understand why studying how the eye works leads to better types of technology, in particular HD TV technology.

So if perception is “more than meets the eye”, then a good, long, and hard look at the eye will help us figure out just what the more is!

In the beginning, there is the eye

Vision begins in the eye and so that’s where we start our discussion on vision too. Some possible topics for your weekly blog entries might include:

1. Roger Carpenter said, “The eye is at once the master and slave of vision.” What did he mean by this?

2. What is an OFF-center ganglion cell receptive field?  Why is it organized they way it is?

3. What does the Transformers theme song have to do with visual perception?

Eyeballs and illusions

Ah, the beautiful eyes, the window into our souls, the canvas on which we paint our emotions!

Neelam wants to start a campaign to save people’s eyes from the dangers of over-wearing contact lenses.  Mike wrote about LASIK surgery and included a beautiful picture of the eye in its natural habitat (note the sarcasm).  Spencer included a nice looking eye as well in his discussion of eye ulcers.  Brian wrote about an alternative to LASIK surgery with no eye pictures to turn your stomach!

Kenyon writes about how once see an illusion, you can never not see it again. Tiffany had some frustratingly good fun messing around with the Mueller-Lyer illusion. In contrast,  Rachel makes the argument about how we willingly play along with visual illusions because it makes the experience of the optical illusion more fun. Jay discusses how optical illusions trick the brain and Jessica discovered a more scientific use for visual illusions: the testing or artificial intelligence devices.

Katie wrote about the connection between eye movements and diagnosing diseases.  Preston and Reena wrote about astigmatism.  Regan wrote about contact lenses, and so did Cho who included a nice illustration of how a nearsighted person might image a visual stimulus on the retina.

So you can see there’s a lot going on here!

It’s all in the eyes

We started our discussion on vision today with an introduction to the eye.  Some possible blog topics include:

1. From class: how do contact lenses really work?

2. Investigate your favorite optical illusion and find out why it works the way it does.

3.  The eye has been likened to a camera.  Where does this analogy succeed and where does it fail?

Keep in mind that these are suggestions for blog topics.  You are welcome to write about anything that strikes your fancy about the topic of perception.

Have a good spring break and let us know how the pupil experiment with your parents go!