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Snowden, Thompson and Troscianko: Basic Vision

Chapter 02

Readings and References

Again the book by Dowling (1987) will give you lots of information on how the receptive fields of the retinal ganglion cells are created, including a description of what those other cells in the retina are doing. There is also a nice description of attempts to build an artificial cybernetic retina (Mahowald and Mead, 1991) that also appears to suffer from many of the illusions described in this chapter.

Papers on specific issues

Receptive fields: It is still worth having a look at some of the classic papers on this by Hartline (1938) and Kuffler (1953): they got Nobel prizes for them! For a more modern perspective, Lennie (2003) is good. You may also be interested to learn about how these receptive fields change as we move from photopic (daytime) vision to scotopic (nightime) vision: Daw et al. (1990).

ON- and OFF-channels: Schiller et al. (1986) offer some reasons why we bother having two types of retinal ganglion cells, and Dolan and Schiller (1989) describe some intriguing experiments regarding what would happen if we had only one type.

Light and dark adaptation: Many students are confused by the slowprocesses involved in dark adaptation and the rapid changes involved in light adaptation. Werblin (1973) should help.

Hermann grid: The illusory spots of the Hermann grid have attracted many researchers. One question is, why does the one you are trying to look at disappear? Also, the simple explanation in this chapter may not be the whole story. The effect gets larger if there are more squares. For some insights into this, see Wolfe (1984).

Troxler fading, or why does an image disappear: Surprisingly little is known about this phenomenon (Wolfe et al. 1984), but it may be part of a more general finding that many things disappear as we look at them. For some more intriguing examples see Ramachandran and Gregory (1991). The article by Mahowald and Mead (1991) also discusses this issue.

 

References

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]  ↑

Dolan, R. P. and Schiller, P. H. (1989). Evidence for only depolarizing bipolar cells in the primate retina. Visual Neuroscience 2, 421-424. [PubMed: 2487079]  ↑

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

Hartline, H. K. (1938). The response of single optic nerve fibres of the vertebrate eye to illumination of the retina. American Journal of Physiology 121, 400-415.  ↑

Kuffler, S. W. (1953). Discharge patterns and functional organization of mammalian retina. Journal of Neurophysiology 16, 37-68. [PubMed: 13035466]  ↑

Lennie, P. (2003). Receptive fields. Current Biology 13, R216-R219. [PubMed: 12646144] [DOI: 10.1016/S0960-9822%2803%2900153-2]  ↑

Mahowald, M. A. and Mead, C. (1991). The silicon retina. Scientific American, May, 40-46.  ↑

Ramachandran, V. S. and Gregory, R. L. (1991). Perceptual filling in of artificially induced scotomas in human vision. Nature 350(6320), 699-702. [PubMed: 2023631] [DOI: 10.1038/350699a0]  ↑

Schiller, P. H., Sandell, J. H., and Maunsell, J. H. R. (1986). Functions of the ON and OFF channels of the visual system. Nature 322, 824-825. [PubMed: 3748169] [DOI: 10.1038/322824a0]  ↑

Werblin, F. W. (1973). The control of sensitivity in the retina. Scientific American 228, January, 71-79.  ↑

Wolfe, J. M., Turner, D., and Maunsell, J. (1984). Troxler fading along different ocular meridians. Perception 13(1), A48.

Wolfe, J. M. (1984). Global factors in the Hermann grid illusion. Perception 13(1), 33-40. [PubMed: 6473049]  ↑