VISION

A photochemical reaction known as photoactivation. The light energy becomes

neural energy and triggers a cascade of neural activity that, a few hundredths of a
second later, will result in your becoming aware of that distant star.
How does vision come to be? First, light enters the eyeball through a tiny hole
known as the pupil and, thanks to the refractive properties of your cornea and lens,
this light signal gets projected sharply into the retina (see Outside Resources for
links to a more detailed description of the eye structure). There, light is transduced
into neural energy by about 200 million photoreceptor cells.
This is where the information carried by the light about distant objects and colors

starts being encoded by our brain. There are two different types of photoreceptors:
rods and cones. The human eye contains more rods than cones. Rods give us
sensitivity under dim lighting conditions and allow us to see at night. Cones allow us
to see fine details in bright light and give us the sensation of color. Cones are tightly
packed around the fovea (the central region of the retina behind your pupil) and
more sparsely elsewhere. Rods populate the periphery (the region surrounding the
fovea) and are almost absent from the fovea.
The information encoded by the photoreceptors undergoes a rapid and continuous
set of ever more complex analysis so that you can make sense of what’s out there.
At the fovea, visual information is encoded separately from tiny portions of the
world to reconstruct the fine visual differences from locations at which you are
directly looking. This fine level of encoding requires lots of light and it is slow going
(neurally speaking).
In contrast, in the periphery, there is a different encoding strategy: detail is
sacrificed in exchange for sensitivity. Information is summed across larger sections
of the world. This aggregation occurs quickly and allows you to detect dim signals
under very low levels of light, as well as detect sudden movements in your
peripheral vision.
CONTRAST
The brain, it turns out, cares little about the overall amount of light coming from a
specific part of the world, or in the scene overall. Rather, it wants to know: does the
light coming from this one point differ from the light coming from the point next to
it.
10ms after light enters your eyes, ganglion cells in your retinae have already
encoded all the differences in light from the world in front of you.
Contrast is so important that your neurons go out of their way not only to encode
differences in light but to exaggerate those differences for you, lest you miss them.
Neurons achieve this via a process known as lateral inhibition. When a neuron is
firing in response to light, it produces two signals: an output signal to pass on to the
next level in vision, and a lateral signal to inhibit all neurons that are next to it.
(Figure shows Illustration of Lateral Inhibition at work. The first row of circles illustrates

photoreceptors responding in a graded fashion: the more light hits them, the more they
fire. The numbers inside the circles represent how much these cells are firing, and the
thickness of lines is also meant to illustrate the strength of neural firing. These
photoreceptors activate the next layer of neurons in the retina: bipolar cells. These cells
produce lateral inhibition signals, depicted by the horizontal lines that end with a small
circle. The inhibition signals are proportional (here, 10% for ease) to the excitatory input
they receive. Cells receiving 100 units will inhibit their neighbors by 10 units. Cells
receiving 20 units will inhibit their neighbors by 2 units. The output of a bipolar cell will
be determined by the input it receives minus all the lateral inhibition signals from its
neighbors.)

SENSITIVITY TO DIFFERENT LIGHT CONDITIONS

To deal with extremes, the visual system relies on the different properties of the
two types of photoreceptors. Rods are mostly responsible for processing light when
photons are scarce but it takes time to replenish the visual pigment that rods
require for photoactivation. So, under bright conditions, rods are quickly bleached
and cannot keep up with the constant barrage of photons hitting them. That’s when
the cones become useful. Cones require more photons to fire and, more critically,
their photopigments replenish much faster than rods’ photopigments, allowing them
to keep up when photons are abundant.
Under bright light, your rods are bleached. When you move into a dark
environment, it will take time before they chemically recover. Once they do, you will
begin to see things around you that initially you could not. This phenomenon is
called dark adaptation.
When you go from dark to bright light, your rods will be bleached in a blaze and you
will be blinded by the sudden light for about 1 second. However, your cones are
ready to fire and you will quickly begin to see at this higher level of light.
the concept of contrast gain: the visual system determines the mean contrast in
a scene and represents values around that mean contrast best, while ignoring
smaller contrast differences.
THE RECONSTRUCTION PROCESS
Neurons project first into the thalamus, in a section known as the lateral geniculate
nucleus. The information then splits and projects towards two different parts of the
brain. Most of the computations regarding reflexive eye movements are computed
in subcortical regions, the evolutionarily older part of the brain. Reflexive eye
movements allow you to quickly orient your eyes towards areas of interest and to
track objects as they move. The more complex computations, those that eventually
allow you to have a visual experience of the world, all happen in the cortex, the
evolutionarily newer region of the brain. The first stop in the cortex is at
the primary visual cortex (also known as V1). Here, the “reconstruction” process
begins in earnest: based on the contrast information arriving from the eyes, neurons
will start computing information about color and simple lines, detecting various
orientations and thicknesses. Small-scale motion signals are also computed. As
information begins to flow towards other “higher” areas of the system, more
complex computations are performed.
Example: An area called MT processes global-motion information; the
parahippocampal place area identifies locations and scenes; the fusiform face area
specializes in identifying objects for which fine discriminations are required, like
faces.
These visual-recognition areas are located along the ventral pathway of the brain
(also known as the What pathway). Other brain regions along the dorsal
pathway (or Where-and-How pathway) will compute information about self- and
object-motion, allowing you to interact with objects, navigate the environment, and
avoid obstacles.

Binocular advantage: having two eyes not only provides you with two chances at
catching a signal in front of you, but the minute difference in perspective that you
get from each eye is used by your brain to reconstruct the sense of three-
dimensional space.
COLOUR
Trichromacy theory, proposed by Young (1802) and Helmholtz (1867), proposed
that the eye had three different types of color-sensitive cells based on the
observation that any one color can be reproduced by combining lights from three
lamps of different hue. Humans have three types of cones: S-cones, M-cones, and L-
cones (also known as blue, green, and red cones, respectively) that are sensitive to
three different wavelengths of light.
Opponent Process theory of color: color is coded via three opponent channels
(red-green, blue-yellow, and black-white). Within each channel, a comparison is
constantly computed between the two elements in the pair. In other words, colors
are encoded as differences between two hues and not as simple combinations of
hues. Again, what matters to the brain is contrast. When one element is stronger
than the other, the stronger color is perceived and the weaker one is suppressed.
When both colors in a pair are present to equal extents, the color perception is
canceled and we perceive a level of grey. This is why you cannot see a reddish
green or a bluish yellow: they cancel each other out. The yellow signal comes from,
it turns out that it is computed by averaging the M- and L-cone signals.
 VISION WITH OTHER MODALITIES OF SENSATIONS
when you move your head in one direction, your eyes reflexively move in the
opposite direction to compensate, allowing you to maintain your gaze on the object
that you are looking at. This reflex is called the vestibulo-ocular reflex. It is
achieved by integrating information from both the visual and the vestibular system
(which knows about body motion and position).
vision is also often implicated in a blending-of-sensations phenomenon known
as synesthesia. It occurs when one sensory signal gives rise to two or more
sensations. The most common type is grapheme-color synesthesia. A more
fascinating forms of synesthesia blend sensations from entirely different sensory
modalities, like taste and color or music and color: the taste of chicken might elicit a
sensation of green.

ATTENTION
Scientists used dichotic listening and shadowing tasks to evaluate the selection
process of attention. Dichotic listening simply refers to the situation when two
messages are presented simultaneously to an individual, with one message in each
ear. In order to control which message the person attends to, the individual is asked
to repeat back or “shadow” one of the messages as he hears it.