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Snowden, Thompson and Troscianko: Basic Vision

Chapter 01

Readings and References

Most ophthalmology books will give you more detailed information about the eye itself and about problems such as short-sightedness, but we find Davson (1990) nice and straightforward. The retina will be covered in most textbooks but the book by Dowling (1987) is a delight and well worth a look if you need to know what all those other cells that we ignored do, or how the receptive fields of the ganglion cells are constructed. The LGN seems to receive scant coverage in most books: perhaps reflecting our puzzlement as to just what it is doing. For many fascinating insights into the eyes of many other creatures, see Land and Nilsson (2001).

Papers on specific issues

Evolution of the eye: How our eyes (and those of other animals with very different eyes) came to be the way they are is covered by Gregory (1967, 1997). The evolution of the eye has often been held up by creationists to be impossible. For a view on just how easy it could have been, see Nilsson and Pelger (1994) and Dawkins (1995).

Pupil dilation, etc: For a series of fascinating insights into when and how our pupils change size, see the classic work of Hess (1965). More recently, pupil size has been used to try to detect deception too: see Lubow and Fein (1996).

Rods and cones: For the actions of rods and cones, Dowling's book mentioned above is excellent. For a little more detail see also Daw et al. (1990).

M, P, and K cells: The lesioning studies of theMand P divisions of the LGN were performed by Schiller et al. (1990). However, what appear to be very contradictory results can be found in Livingstone and Hubel (1988). See also Chapter 11, where we follow these pathways as they reach deep into the cortex. For information on the koniocellular pathway, see Hendry and Reid (2000).

What LGN cells might actually be doing: There have been many theories that have tried to give a specific function to the LGN (rather than just passing on information from the retina to the cortex). One of the most recent and interesting is by Sherman (2001).

Dyslexia and visual problems: There has been an explosion of interest in the idea that a specific visual problem might underlie the problems of a person with dyslexia. Many papers exist on this still controversial area. To get a flavour of the evidence for and against, see Stein et al. (2000) and Skottun (2000) respectively.

 

References

Andrews, T. J., Halpern, S. D., and Purves, D. (1997). Correlated size variations in human visual cortex, lateral geniculate nucleus and optic tract. Journal of Neuroscience 17, 2859-2868. [PubMed: 9092607]

Davson, H. (1990). Physiology of the eye, 5th edition. London: Macmillan.  ↑

Daw, N. W., Jensen, R. J., and Brunken, W. J. (1990). Rod pathways in mammalian retinae. Trends in Neurosciences 13, 110-115. [PubMed: 1691871] [DOI: 10.1016/0166-2236%2890%2990187-F]  ↑

Dawkins, R. (1995) Where d'you get those peepers? New Statesman and Society 8, 29.  ↑

Dowling, J. E. (1987) The retina. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.  ↑

Gregory, R. L. (1967). Origin of eyes and brains. Nature 213(74), 369-372. [PubMed: 6029520] [DOI: 10.1038/213369a0]  ↑

Gregory, R. L. (1997). Eye and brain, 5th edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  ↑

Hendry, S. H. and Reid, R. C. (2000) The koniocellular visual pathway. Annual Review of Neuroscience 23, 127-153. [PubMed: 10845061] [DOI: 10.1146/annurev.neuro.23.1.127]  ↑

Hess, E. H. (1965). Attitude and pupil size. Scientific American 212(2), 46-54.  ↑

Hubel, D. H. (1988) Eye, brain and vision. New York: Scientific American Press.

Land, M. F. and Nilsson, D.-E. (2001) Animal eyes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  ↑

Livingstone, M. S. and Hubel, D. H. (1988). Segregation of form, color, movement and depth: anatomy, physiology and perception. Science 240, 740-749. [PubMed: 3283936]  ↑

Lubow, R. E. and Fein, O. (1996). Pupillary size in response to a visual guilty knowledge test: new technique for the detection of deception. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 2(2), 164-177. [DOI: 10.1037/1076-898X.2.2.164]  ↑

Nilsson, D.-E. and Pelger, S. (1994). A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Biological Sciences, 256, 53-58.  ↑

Roorda, A. and Williams, D. R. (1999). The arrangement of the three cone classes in the living human eye. Nature 397, 520-522. [PubMed: 10028967] [DOI: 10.1038/17383]

Schiller, P. H., Logothetis, N. K., and Charles, E. R. (1990). Functions of the colour-opponent and broadband channels of the visual system. Nature 343, 68-70. [PubMed: 2296292] [DOI: 10.1038/343068a0]  ↑

Sherman, S. M. (2001). Tonic and burst firing: dual modes of thalmocortical relay. Trends in Neurosciences 24, 122-126. [PubMed: 11164943] [DOI: 10.1016/S0166-2236%2800%2901714-8]  ↑

Skottun, B. C. (2000). The magnocellular deficit theory of dyslexia: the evidence from contrast sensitivity. Vision Research 40, 111-127. [PubMed: 10768046] [DOI: 10.1016/S0042-6989%2899%2900170-4]  ↑

Stein, J., Talcott, J., and Walsh, V. (2000). Controversy about the visual magnocellular deficit in developmental dyslexics. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4, 209-211. [PubMed: 10827442] [DOI: 10.1016/S1364-6613%2800%2901484-4]  ↑

Wandell, B. (1996) Foundations of vision. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates.