Theoretical analysis of photoreceptor noise.
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Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Y Y Zeevi.
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Processing of spatio-temporal information in the human visual system has been investigated thoroughly during the past decade, but is still far from being properly understood. Moreover, the theory of separation of information by means of sustained and transient channels already at the retinal level is not satisfactory, as experimental results indicate that these two types of channels span a continuum of temporal characteristics. It is however obvious, that the process of pattern recognition and velocity perception calls for their separation at some level of the hierarchy. In this communication, we extend our model of three-dimensional spatio-temporal frequency expansion in the visual system (Gafni and Zeevi, 1977) to show how velocity-information extraction channels, sensitive to direction and velocity exclusively, can be formed by simple summation of signals from well-defined sets of channels representing points in the frequency space. Correspondence of these channels to characteristics of the cortical neurons is discussed.
Methods of analysis for some deterministic and stochastic variants of the integrate-to-threshold neural coding scheme are presented. Adaptation phenomena are modeled by means of feedforward and feedback adaptive threshold control. Simulations of sinusoidal and step responses reproduce satisfactorily the qualitative characteristics of adaptation as compared with physiological data. It is postulated that such adaptive threshold control may be accomplished by the release, or conformation change, of molecules involved in the control of excitable-channel dynamics.
Secondary visual feedback (2VFB) is a visual signal derived from continuous measurement of eye position and provides an extra artificial indication of the point of gaze. 2VFB may be eccentrically displaced and subjects are able to visually superimpose 2VFB onto a visual target signal and thus achieve and maintain eccentric fixation. Initial transient patterns of movement depend upon training but even naive subjects can achieve eccentric fixation within the first 40 s of such a task. Individual strategies and idiosyncratic patterns are exaggerations of normal control and fixational eye movements. The variance of maintained fixation increases with eccentricity and appears to be related to visual acuity as well as to precision of ocular motor control.
Displaying the point of gaze to the observer in addition to a point target provides a secondary visual feedback (2VFB). Eccentric fixation is achieved using a biased 2VFB to yield an experimentally imposed "eccentric fovea." The target is suddenly moved to a new position and the task is to regain it, in the "eccentric fovea". It is found that the pattern of eye-movement response consistently starts with saccadric foveal exploration of the target, but its latency has twice the duration of a regular voluntary saccade. Practice, however, makes for the shortened latency tending asymptotically to the regular saccadic duration.
Transient and sustained visual mechanisms were studied with single, flickering bars of various widths. Wide bars were largely detected on the basis of temporal luminance transients whereas thin bars were detected on the basis of the sustained contrast. A rapidly flickering uniform field selectively masked wide flickering bars, which suggests that different mechanisms detect wide versus thin flickering bars. For coarse spatial patterns, stimulus onsets were slightly more visible than stimulus offsets, and the response to onsets and offsets approximately summated.
Evidence for motion-selective mechanisms sensitive to high spatial frequencies (e.g., 15 c/deg) was obtained via direction-specific adaptation and measurements of the threshold ratios for moving and counterphase flickering gratings.
Quantal noise is the main limiting factor of visual contrast sensitivity only over an intermediate range of light intensities. At low and high intensities receptor and neural noise determine the bound on sensitivity. In this paper we analyze the effect of receptor nonlinearity on the statistics of visual signals and show its role in the suppression of quantal and receptor noise at high light intensities. This provides adequate physical interpretation of physiological data. Extending this analysis to the behavior of the whole visual system, we arrive at the conclusion that such noise suppression provides a unified explanation of psychophysical incremental threshold data over the whole visual range.
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