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Alterations in chromatic contour perception in de novo parkinsonian patients.

Recently abnormalities of chromatic visual perception were reported in treated patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). We studied 28 previously untreated Parkinsonian patients and 28 age- and sex-matched controls using a computer-aided method to determine the chromatic fusion time (CFT). CFT indicates the acuity of the perception of monochromatic contours. Patients with PD have a shortened CFT especially for the light-blue and dark-green stimuli. The chromatic perception disorder is correlated with the severity of PD. It can be concluded from our data that the dysfunction of colour perception is related to the pathophysiology of PD.

Adult↗

Laminar thermocoagulation of the visual cortex in the rat. II. Visual pattern discrimination.

Hooded rats were trained on a series of four visual discrimination tasks in a Y-maze, and subjected to a variety of posterior cortical lesions. In 17 animals this consisted of an extensive aspiration lesion contralateral to a more superficial lesion made by laminar thermocoagulation and centered over the striate area. After operation the animals were tested on the same problem series. The behavioral deficit in this group varied with the extent and depth of the thermal lesion, and six animals with very superficial thermal lesions displayed an isolated difficulty in solving an encircled triangle problem. This deficit seemed to be referable to widespread involvement of supragranular cortex, and specifically of layer I of area striata which receives an input from the nonspecific thalamocortical afferents. The possible influence of various interlaminar projections upon underlying vertically-oriented cell columns as a mechanism for the mediation of 'selective attention' was discussed.

Animals↗

Perception of surface slant from oriented textures.

When a surface covered with a regular texture is viewed in perspective, the projected texture provides a number of cues to 3D surface orientation. For oriented textures, one cue is perspective convergence: symmetry lines that are parallel along the surface project to lines that vary systematically in orientation. We investigated the contribution of perspective convergence to perception of 3D slant and tested whether slant from convergence depends on oriented spectral components. Subjects judged the sign of slant about a vertical axis of rotation. Textures were composed of filled circles in three spatial arrangements: a hex grid with symmetry lines at 0 and +/-60 deg relative to the tilt direction (aligned condition), a hex grid with symmetry lines at 90 and +/-30 deg (perpendicular condition), and random arrangements with similar average spacing (isotropic condition). The two hex grid textures differed in the amount of spectral energy present in the tilt direction (horizontal) but were otherwise closely matched. Slant discrimination thresholds for monocular stimuli were higher for isotropic textures than for either of the two hex grid textures and were higher for the perpendicular texture than for the aligned texture. In a second experiment, we measured the weight given to texture relative to binocular slant information for cue conflict stimuli (+/-5 deg). Weights were found to agree with individual subjects' monocular thresholds, in accordance with optimal estimation theory. We conclude that the visual system uses perspective convergence to perceive slant and that effective use of convergence requires the presence of spectral components aligned with the tilt direction.

Cues↗

Visual cortical dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease evaluated with a temporally graded "stress test" during PET.

OBJECTIVE: Visual-processing abnormalities commonly contribute to typical Alzheimer's disease symptoms, but their detailed pathophysiology remains unknown. To investigate why patients with Alzheimer's disease have greater difficulty performing visuoconstructive (magnocellular-dominated) tasks than face- or color-perception (parvocellular-dominated) tasks, the authors measured brain activation in response to a temporally graded visual stimulus (neural stress test) during positron emission tomography. METHOD: The stress test measured regional cerebral blood flow (CBF) in response to a patterned flash stimulus in the resting state (0 Hz in the dark) and at frequencies of 1, 2, 4, 7, and 14 Hz. Ten patients with Alzheimer's disease and 12 age- and sex-matched comparison subjects were studied. RESULTS: The striate response at 7 Hz and 14 Hz (the degree of regional CBF increase from that at 0 Hz) was significantly less in the patients than in the comparison subjects, whereas the change in regional CBF at the lower frequencies did not differ between groups. In bilateral middle temporal association areas activated by motion and dominated by magnocellular input, regional CBF at 1 Hz (the frequency with maximal apparent motion) was significantly greater than at 0 Hz in the comparison subjects but not in the patients. CONCLUSIONS: The magnocellular visual system normally responds to high-frequency input and motion; the failure of response in the striate cortex at high but not low frequencies in the Alzheimer's patients suggests greater magnocellular than parvocellular dysfunction at these levels. Activation failure in the middle temporal areas in the patients supports magnocellular dysfunction. The finding that the Alzheimer's disease group had abnormal visual cortical function emphasizes the importance of clinical visuospatial evaluation of patients with Alzheimer's disease to fully understand symptom production and to plan interventions.

Aged↗

Simultaneous adaptation to size, distance, and curvature underwater.

Perceptual adaptation to underwater size, distance, and curvature distortion was measured for four different adaptation conditions. These conditions consisted of (a) playing Chinese checkers underwater, (b) swimming with eyes open underwater, (c) viewing a square underwater, and (d) an air control. Significant adaptation to underwater distortions was recorded in all except the air control condition. In the viewing square condition a positive correlation between size and distance adaptation was noted. It was suggested that adaptation to curvature may have mediated the positive correlation. Possible applications for the training of divers are discussed.

Adaptation, Ocular↗

Mechanisms involved in the Münsterberg "shifted chequerboard" illusion: an empirical test.

In the present work three alternative hypotheses proposed as explanations of the Münsterberg illusion are discussed: the Moulden and Renshaw 1979 hypothesis, which explains this effect using Helmholtz's 1856 "irradiation theory," the Gregory and Heard 1979 hypothesis, which proposes a mechanism of "border locking," and the McCourt 1982 hypothesis, which sustains a relation between this effect and brightness induction phenomena. To check these hypotheses, we took four measures, each one obtained by using a different pair of patterns mounted on circular displays which could be tilted by 360 degrees. The results do not support McCourt's hypothesis but, on the other hand, they seem to be partially in agreement, or at least not to be in disagreement, with the hypotheses both of Moulden and Renshaw and of Gregory and Heard.

Attention↗

The design of telepresence systems: the task-dependent use of binocular disparity and motion parallax.

The effect of different visual depth cues presented through a head-mounted display in a dark (no pictorial cue) environment was investigated. The relative effects of binocular disparity, motion parallax, and a combination of the 2, were assessed for 3 tasks at 2 viewing distances. These tasks (which varied in the minimum amount of information they required) were a nulling task, setting a triangle to be equilateral and matching the base-to-apex magnitude of 2 triangles at different distances. Performance within the tasks varied considerably but was most accurate for the nulling task. Differences between viewing conditions may be due to a failure in the assessment of absolute viewing distance. It is argued that these results are task specific. Although there was some variation between different cue types, they appear to be largely interchangeable within the tasks. These results have implications for system designers selecting an appropriate display device for a telepresence system.

Adult↗

Perceived velocity of moving chromatic gratings.

Equiluminous red-green sine-wave gratings were drifted at a uniform rate in the bottom half of a 10-deg field. In the top half of the display was a sinusoidal-luminance grating of the same spatial frequency and 95% contrast that drifted in the opposite direction. Observers, while fixating a point in the display center, adjusted the speed of this upper comparison grating so that it appeared to match the velocity of the chromatic grating below. At low spatial frequencies, equiluminous gratings were appreciably slowed and sometimes stopped even though the individual bars of the grating could be easily resolved. The amount of slowing was proportionally greatest for gratings with slow drift rates. Blue-yellow sine-wave gratings showed similar effects. When luminance contrast was held constant, increasing chrominance modulation caused further decreases in apparent velocity, ruling out the possibility that the slowing was simply due to decreased luminance contrast. Perceived velocity appears to be a weighted average of luminance and chrominance velocity information.

Color Perception↗

Role of chromatic and luminance contrast in inferring structure from motion.

We measured the ability to infer structure from motion (SFM) in several directions in three-dimensional color space. Only motion cues are useful to subjects in performing this three-dimensional shape-identification task. We report the following results: (1) SFM performance is at chance for equiluminant stimuli that isolate short-wavelength-sensitive cones. Hence the short-wavelength-sensitive-cone input to SFM is negligible. (2) SFM performance increases with the magnitude of delta L - delta M signal when delta L + delta M = 0 (i.e., only chromatic and no luminance contrast is available). We reject the hypothesis that SFM obtains input from a single chromatic mechanism combining the long- and medium-wavelength-sensitive cones linearly. Our data are compatible with SFM that uses the output of two mechanisms, one taking the difference between the long- and medium-wavelength-sensitive-cone signals and the other taking the respective sum. We reject the particular hypothesis that SFM utilizes only the magnitude and not the sign of the long- and medium-wavelength-sensitive-cone signal. (3) We compare SFM performance with threshold performance for velocity and motion discrimination. Stimuli with luminance contrast yield SFM performance that is superior to stimuli without luminance contrast when they are expressed as multiples of velocity discrimination threshold. This superiority is even greater when SFM performance is compared with motion-direction discrimination thresholds.

Color Perception↗

Orientation and spatial-frequency discrimination for luminance and chromatic gratings.

We have examined the accuracy of orientation and spatial-frequency discrimination for sine-wave gratings that vary in either luminance or color. The equiluminant chromatic gratings were modulated along either a tritanopic confusion axis (so that they were detectable on the basis of activity in only the short-wavelength-sensitive cones) or an axis of constant short-wavelength-sensitive cone excitation (so that they could be detected on the basis of opposing activity in only the long- and medium-wavelength-sensitive cones). Grating contrasts ranged from the detection threshold to the highest levels that we could produce; the contrasts of the luminance and color patterns were equated for equal multiples of their respective detection thresholds. Discrimination thresholds for all patterns showed a similar dependence on stimulus contrast, rising sharply at low contrasts and becoming nearly asymptotic at moderate contrasts. However, even at threshold contrasts, observers could still reliably discriminate sufficiently large differences in the orientation or spatial frequency of all patterns, and they could also reliably identify the type of variation (luminance or which color) defining the grafting. For most conditions the discrimination thresholds did not differ from the two types of color grafting and reached values as low as 1 deg (orientation) or 4% (spatial frequency). Thus observers were able to make accurate spatial judgments on the basis of either type of chromatic information. However, these thresholds were slightly but consistently higher than the thresholds for comparable luminance graftings. This difference in the color and luminance discrimination thresholds may reflect somewhat coarser orientation and spatial-frequency selectivity in the mechanisms encoding the chromatic patterns.

Color Perception↗

Influence of shape and perimeter length on induced color contrast.

The magnitude of induced color contrast was measured for tests whose areas, perimeter lengths, and shapes were independently varied. Test shapes were smoothly contoured, multiple-lobed figures generated from unitary Fourier shape descriptors. The shapes had from 3 to 40 lobes and were equal in area to a disk of diameter 2 deg, with perimeter lengths of 1.25, 1.75, 2.25, and 2.75 times the circumference of a 2-deg disk. The surround was a 5-deg disk. The surround was modulated sinusoidally along one of the three cardinal directions of color space around an equal-energy white of 50 cd/m2. The observer nulled the modulation induced into the test by adjusting the amplitude of real modulation in the test. The amplitude of nulling modulation was the measure of induction. The main result was that the amount of induction was similar for all tests of equal area irrespective of the shape or the length of perimeter.

Color Perception↗

Immobility of some second-order stimuli in human peripheral vision.

Real-world objects and events are often demarcated and defined by changes of luminance. Such stimuli are easily noticed by human beings whether the stimuli occur in central or in peripheral vision. It is also possible to use differences of color, texture, contrast, or temporal characteristics to create visual stimuli (so-called non-luminance-domain or second-order stimuli). Here I report the discovery that a variety of spatially periodic, second-order patterns, when set in motion in peripheral vision, appear stationary even though their structure is clearly visible. The immobility of the second-order stimuli is evidenced by the striking inability of observers to report their direction of motion. Special signal transformations are required to reveal the motion of second-order stimuli to higher-stage motion mechanisms, and the immobility of second-order stimuli in peripheral but not in central vision suggests that the processing of the transformed signals by higher-stage motion mechanisms changes radically from central to peripheral vision.

Color Perception↗