The New Visual Neurosciences


Book Description

A comprehensive review of contemporary research in the vision sciences, reflecting the rapid advances of recent years. Visual science is the model system for neuroscience, its findings relevant to all other areas. This essential reference to contemporary visual neuroscience covers the extraordinary range of the field today, from molecules and cell assemblies to systems and therapies. It provides a state-of-the art companion to the earlier book The Visual Neurosciences (MIT Press, 2003). This volume covers the dramatic advances made in the last decade, offering new topics, new authors, and new chapters. The New Visual Neurosciences assembles groundbreaking research, written by international authorities. Many of the 112 chapters treat seminal topics not included in the earlier book. These new topics include retinal feature detection; cortical connectomics; new approaches to mid-level vision and spatiotemporal perception; the latest understanding of how multimodal integration contributes to visual perception; new theoretical work on the role of neural oscillations in information processing; and new molecular and genetic techniques for understanding visual system development. An entirely new section covers invertebrate vision, reflecting the importance of this research in understanding fundamental principles of visual processing. Another new section treats translational visual neuroscience, covering recent progress in novel treatment modalities for optic nerve disorders, macular degeneration, and retinal cell replacement. The New Visual Neurosciences is an indispensable reference for students, teachers, researchers, clinicians, and anyone interested in contemporary neuroscience. Associate Editors Marie Burns, Joy Geng, Mark Goldman, James Handa, Andrew Ishida, George R. Mangun, Kimberley McAllister, Bruno Olshausen, Gregg Recanzone, Mandyam Srinivasan, W.Martin Usrey, Michael Webster, David Whitney Sections Retinal Mechanisms and Processes Organization of Visual Pathways Subcortical Processing Processing in Primary Visual Cortex Brightness and Color Pattern, Surface, and Shape Objects and Scenes Time, Motion, and Depth Eye Movements Cortical Mechanisms of Attention, Cognition, and Multimodal Integration Invertebrate Vision Theoretical Perspectives Molecular and Developmental Processes Translational Visual Neuroscience




The Neuroscience of Visual Hallucinations


Book Description

Each year, some two million people in the United Kingdom experience visual hallucinations. Infrequent, fleeting visual hallucinations, often around sleep, are a usual feature of life. In contrast, consistent, frequent, persistent hallucinations during waking are strongly associated with clinical disorders; in particular delirium, eye disease, psychosis, and dementia. Research interest in these disorders has driven a rapid expansion in investigatory techniques, new evidence, and explanatory models. In parallel, a move to generative models of normal visual function has resolved the theoretical tension between veridical and hallucinatory perceptions. From initial fragmented areas of investigation, the field has become increasingly coherent over the last decade. Controversies and gaps remain, but for the first time the shapes of possible unifying models are becoming clear, along with the techniques for testing these. This book provides a comprehensive survey of the neuroscience of visual hallucinations and the clinical techniques for testing these. It brings together the very latest evidence from cognitive neuropsychology, neuroimaging, neuropathology, and neuropharmacology, placing this within current models of visual perception. Leading researchers from a range of clinical and basic science areas describe visual hallucinations in their historical and scientific context, combining introductory information with up-to-date discoveries. They discuss results from the main investigatory techniques applied in a range of clinical disorders. The final section outlines future research directions investigating the potential for new understandings of veridical and hallucinatory perceptions, and for treatments of problematic hallucinations. Fully comprehensive, this is an essential reference for clinicians in the fields of the psychology and psychiatry of hallucinations, as well as for researchers in departments, research institutes and libraries. It has strong foundations in neuroscience, cognitive science, optometry, psychiatry, psychology, clinical medicine, and philosophy. With its lucid explanation and many illustrations, it is a clear resource for educators and advanced undergraduate and graduate students.




Brain, Vision, Memory


Book Description

In these engaging tales describing the growth of knowledge about the brain—from the early Egyptians and Greeks to the Dark Ages and the Renaissance to the present time—Gross attempts to answer the question of how the discipline of neuroscience evolved into its modern incarnation through the twists and turns of history. Charles G. Gross is an experimental neuroscientist who specializes in brain mechanisms in vision. He is also fascinated by the history of his field. In these tales describing the growth of knowledge about the brain from the early Egyptians and Greeks to the present time, he attempts to answer the question of how the discipline of neuroscience evolved into its modern incarnation through the twists and turns of history. The first essay tells the story of the visual cortex, from the first written mention of the brain by the Egyptians, to the philosophical and physiological studies by the Greeks, to the Dark Ages and the Renaissance, and finally, to the modern work of Hubel and Wiesel. The second essay focuses on Leonardo da Vinci's beautiful anatomical work on the brain and the eye: was Leonardo drawing the body observed, the body remembered, the body read about, or his own dissections? The third essay derives from the question of whether there can be a solely theoretical biology or biologist; it highlights the work of Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic who was two hundred years ahead of his time. The fourth essay entails a mystery: how did the largely ignored brain structure called the "hippocampus minor" come to be, and why was it so important in the controversies that swirled about Darwin's theories? The final essay describes the discovery of the visual functions of the temporal and parietal lobes. The author traces both developments to nineteenth-century observations of the effect of temporal and parietal lesions in monkeys—observations that were forgotten and subsequently rediscovered.




The Cognitive Neuroscience of Vision


Book Description

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Vision begins by introducing the reader to the anatomy of the eye and visual cortex and then proceeds to discuss image and representation, face recognition, printed word recognition, visual sematic memory and visual attention and perception.




Computational Vision


Book Description

This text provides an introduction to computational aspects of early vision, in particular, color, stereo, and visual navigation. It integrates approaches from psychophysics and quantitative neurobiology, as well as theories and algorithms from machine vision and photogrammetry. When presenting mathematical material, it uses detailed verbal descriptions and illustrations to clarify complex points. The text is suitable for upper-level students in neuroscience, biology, and psychology who have basic mathematical skills and are interested in studying the mathematical modeling of perception.




Blind Vision


Book Description

An investigation of the effects of blindness and other types of visual deficit on cognitive abilities. Can a blind person see? The very idea seems paradoxical. And yet, if we conceive of "seeing" as the ability to generate internal mental representations that may contain visual details, the idea of blind vision becomes a concept subject to investigation. In this book, Zaira Cattaneo and Tomaso Vecchi examine the effects of blindness and other types of visual deficit on the development and functioning of the human cognitive system. Drawing on behavioral and neurophysiological data, Cattaneo and Vecchi analyze research on mental imagery, spatial cognition, and compensatory mechanisms at the sensorial, cognitive, and cortical levels in individuals with complete or profound visual impairment. They find that our brain does not need our eyes to "see." Cattaneo and Vecchi address critical questions of broad importance: the relationship of visual perception to imagery and working memory and the extent to which mental imagery depends on normal vision; the functional and neural relationships between vision and the other senses; the specific aspects of the visual experience that are crucial to cognitive development or specific cognitive mechanisms; and the extraordinary plasticity of the brain—as illustrated by the way that, in the blind, the visual cortex may be reorganized to support other perceptual or cognitive funtions. In the absence of vision, the other senses work as functional substitutes and are often improved. With Blind Vision, Cattaneo and Vecchi take on the "tyranny of the visual," pointing to the importance of the other senses in cognition.




Visual Cortex and Deep Networks


Book Description

A mathematical framework that describes learning of invariant representations in the ventral stream, offering both theoretical development and applications. The ventral visual stream is believed to underlie object recognition in primates. Over the past fifty years, researchers have developed a series of quantitative models that are increasingly faithful to the biological architecture. Recently, deep learning convolution networks—which do not reflect several important features of the ventral stream architecture and physiology—have been trained with extremely large datasets, resulting in model neurons that mimic object recognition but do not explain the nature of the computations carried out in the ventral stream. This book develops a mathematical framework that describes learning of invariant representations of the ventral stream and is particularly relevant to deep convolutional learning networks. The authors propose a theory based on the hypothesis that the main computational goal of the ventral stream is to compute neural representations of images that are invariant to transformations commonly encountered in the visual environment and are learned from unsupervised experience. They describe a general theoretical framework of a computational theory of invariance (with details and proofs offered in appendixes) and then review the application of the theory to the feedforward path of the ventral stream in the primate visual cortex.




The Visual Neurosciences


Book Description

An essential reference book for visual science.




Pioneer Visual Neuroscience


Book Description

This book honors Naomi Weisstein’s foreshortened span of work published from 1964 to 1992. Naomi Weisstein was a pioneer in the areas we now call visual neuroscience, visual cognition, and cognitive neuroscience. Her enthusiastic pursuit of the mind was infectious, inspiring many others to take up the challenge. Despite her time as an active researcher being cut short, Weisstein’s impact was far reaching and long lasting, and many of her ideas and insights foreshadowed today’s active areas of inquiry into the inner workings of the mind. Comprising contributions from leading scholars in the field, Pioneer Visual Neuroscience outlines Weisstein’s many contributions to the study of visual perception and processing and their effects on the field today. This volume will be of interest to anyone interested in visual perception, visual cognition, and cognitive neuroscience.




The Camera and the Brain


Book Description

The Camera and the Brain follows two photons on their different paths: One flies through the lens of a camera onto a photographic sensor, and is transformed into a part of a photograph. The other one flies through the lens of a human eye, onto the retina, to be converted into a human percept. I discuss the perception of motion, scale and color, the constant scanning movements of our eyes called saccades, and the recognition of objects like faces. I also explain the fundamental difference between perceiving and photographing. The book is illustrated with my own photographs and illustrations by Anna Farrell.