Biomedical subjects

Dennis M Levi

Publications and source records attributed to Dennis M Levi.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Temporal dynamics of figure-ground segregation in human vision.

The segregation of figure from ground is arguably one of the most fundamental operations in human vision. Neural signals reflecting this operation appear in cortex as early as 50 ms and as late as 300 ms after presentation of a visual stimulus, but it is not known when these signals are used by the brain to construct the percepts of figure and ground. We used psychophysical reverse correlation to identify the temporal window for figure-ground signals in human perception and found it to lie within the range of 100-160 ms. Figure enhancement within this narrow temporal window was transient rather than sustained as may be expected from measurements in single neurons. These psychophysical results prompt and guide further electrophysiological studies.

Action Potentials↗

PubMed2006

Identification of contrast-defined letters benefits from perceptual learning in adults with amblyopia.

Amblyopes show specific deficits in processing second-order spatial information (e.g. Wong, Levi, & McGraw (2001). Is second-order spatial loss in amblyopia explained by the loss of first-order spatial input? Vision Research, 41, 2951-2960). Recent work suggests there is a significant degree of plasticity in the visual pathway that processes first-order spatial information in adults with amblyopia. In this study, we asked whether or not there is similar plasticity in the ability to process second-order spatial information in adults with amblyopia. Ten adult observers with amblyopia (five strabismic, four anisometropic and one mixed) were trained to identify contrast-defined (second-order) letters using their amblyopic eyes. Before and after training, we determined observers' contrast thresholds for identifying luminance-defined (first-order) and contrast-defined letters, separately for the non-amblyopic and amblyopic eyes. Following training, eight of the 10 observers showed a significant reduction in contrast thresholds for identifying contrast-defined letters with the amblyopic eye. Five of these observers also showed a partial transfer of improvement to their fellow untrained non-amblyopic eye for identifying contrast-defined letters. There was a small but statistically significant transfer to the untrained task of identifying luminance-defined letters in the same trained eye. Similar to first-order spatial tasks, adults with amblyopia benefit from perceptual learning for identifying contrast-defined letters in their amblyopic eyes, suggesting a sizeable degree of plasticity in the visual pathway for processing second-order spatial information.

Adaptation, Ocular↗

PubMed2006

Receptive versus perceptive fields from the reverse-correlation viewpoint.

This brief review article brings together a series of related experiments in psychophysics and physiology that show striking similarities between measurements in human observers and in single neurons. We consider seven pairs of primary research articles, each pair consisting of one paper in physiology and one in psychophysics, and we highlight common features between receptive and perceptive fields obtained using reverse correlation. We conclude by discussing how to assess the validity of perceptive fields as predictors of human responses, and by deriving a novel expression for the maximum trial-by-trial predictability attainable by any model for any psychophysical task.

Humans↗

PubMed2006

The receptive field and internal noise for position acuity change with feature separation.

Humans are exquisitely sensitive to changes in relative position. A fundamental and long-standing question is how information for position acuity is integrated along the length of the target, and why visual performance deteriorates when the feature separation increases. To address this question, we used a target made of discrete samples, each subjected to binary positional noise, combined with reverse correlation to estimate the behavioral "receptive field" (template), and a novel 10-pass method to quantify the internal noise that limits position acuity. Our results show that human observers weigh individual parts of the stimulus differently and importantly, that the shape of the template changes markedly with feature separation. Compared to an ideal observer, human performance is limited by a template that becomes less efficient as feature separation increases and by an increase in random internal noise. Although systematic internal noise is thought to be one of the important components limiting detection thresholds, we found that systematic noise is negligible in our position task.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

Spatial resolution for feature binding is impaired in peripheral and amblyopic vision.

We measured spatial resolution for discriminating targets that differed from nearby distractors in either color or orientation or their conjunction. In the fovea of normal human observers, whenever both attributes are big enough to be individually visible, their conjunction is also visible. In the periphery, the two attributes may be visible, but their conjunction may be invisible. We found a similar impairment in resolving conjunctions for the fovea of deprived eyes of humans with abnormal visual development (amblyopia). These results are quantitatively explained by a model of primary visual cortex (V1) in which orientation and color maps are imperfectly co-registered topographically. Our results in persons with amblyopia indicate that the ability of the fovea to compensate for this poor co-registration is consolidated by visual experience during postnatal development.

Amblyopia↗

PubMed2006

Meaningful interactions can enhance visual discrimination of human agents.

The ability to interpret and predict other people's actions is highly evolved in humans and is believed to play a central role in their cognitive behavior. However, there is no direct evidence that this ability confers a tangible benefit to sensory processing. Our quantitative behavioral experiments show that visual discrimination of a human agent is influenced by the presence of a second agent. This effect depended on whether the two agents interacted (by fighting or dancing) in a meaningful synchronized fashion that allowed the actions of one agent to serve as predictors for the expected actions of the other agent, even though synchronization was irrelevant to the visual discrimination task. Our results demonstrate that action understanding has a pervasive impact on the human ability to extract visual information from the actions of other humans, providing quantitative evidence of its significance for sensory performance.

Cognition↗

PubMed2006

Visual processing in amblyopia: human studies.

Within the last five years, there have been a number of exciting new advances in our knowledge and understanding of amblyopia. This article reviews recent psychophysical studies of naturally occurring amblyopia in humans. These studies suggest that: 1) There are significant differences in the patterns of visual loss among the clinically defined categories of amblyopes. A key factor in determining the nature of the loss is the presence or absence of binocularity. 2) Dysfunction within the amblyopic visual system first occurs in area V1, and the effects of amblyopia may be amplified downstream. 3) There appears to be substantial neural plasticity in the amblyopic brain beyond the "critical period."

Amblyopia↗

PubMed2005

Learning to identify contrast-defined letters in peripheral vision.

Performance for identifying luminance-defined letters in peripheral vision improves with training. The purpose of the present study was to examine whether performance for identifying contrast-defined letters also improves with training in peripheral vision, and whether any improvement transfers to luminance-defined letters. Eight observers were trained to identify contrast-defined letters presented singly at 10 degrees eccentricity in the inferior visual field. Before and after training, we measured observers' thresholds for identifying luminance-defined and contrast-defined letters, embedded within a field of white luminance noise (maximum luminance contrast=0, 0.25, and 0.5), at the same eccentric location. Each training session consisted of 10 blocks (100 trials per block) of identifying contrast-defined letters at a background noise contrast of 0.5. Letters (x-height=4.2 degrees) were the 26 lowercase letters of the Times-Roman alphabet. Luminance-defined letters were generated by introducing a luminance difference between the stimulus letter and its mid-gray background. The background noise covered both the letter and its background. Contrast-defined letters were generated by introducing a differential noise contrast between the group of pixels that made up the stimulus letter and the group of pixels that made up the background. Following training, observers showed a significant reduction in threshold for identifying contrast-defined letters (p<0.0001). Averaged across observers and background noise contrasts, the reduction was 25.8%, with the greatest reduction (32%) occurring at the trained background noise contrast. There was virtually no transfer of improvement to luminance-defined letters, or to an untrained letter size (2 x original), or an untrained retinal location (10 degrees superior field). In contrast, learning transferred completely to the untrained contralateral eye. Our results show that training improves performance for identifying contrast-defined letters in peripheral vision. This perceptual learning effect seems to be stimulus-specific, as it shows no transfer to the identification of luminance-defined letters. The complete interocular transfer, and the retinotopic (retinal location) and size specificity of the learning effect are consistent with the properties of neurons in early visual area V2.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

The essential role of stimulus temporal patterning in enabling perceptual learning.

Little is known about how temporal stimulus factors influence perceptual learning. Here we demonstrate an essential role of stimulus temporal patterning in enabling perceptual learning by showing that 'unlearnable' contrast and motion-direction discrimination (resulting from random interleaving of stimuli) can be readily learned when stimuli are practiced in a fixed temporal pattern. This temporal patterning does not facilitate learning by reducing stimulus uncertainty; further, learning enabled by temporal patterning can later generalize to randomly presented stimuli.

Analysis of Variance↗

PubMed2005

Two sources of error in pop-out localization.

An odd-one-out stimulus, such as a vertical bar among horizontals, pops out from the background and is easily detected, but its location may be slightly ambiguous. Four observers were asked to pinpoint these stimuli on thousands of trials, in 5 x 5 and 9 x 9 arrays of Gabor patches. We found they made frequent errors toward neighbors of the target. Over a range of performance from 41% to 96% correct, the frequency of neighbor errors was well described by a linear function of the total error frequency, a function that might result from mixing together two spatial distributions--one broad, the other narrow. We suggest that these represent two sources of error in pop-out localization; one might correspond to a higher visual area with imprecise retinotopic mapping, and the other to a more fine-grained localization process in primary visual cortex.

Depth Perception↗

PubMed2005

Perceptual learning in adults with amblyopia: a reevaluation of critical periods in human vision.

Critical periods for experience-dependent plasticity are ubiquitous. The idea that experience-dependent plasticity is closely linked with the development of sensory function is still widely held; however, there also is growing evidence for plasticity in the adult nervous system. This article reviews the notion of a critical period for the treatment of amblyopia in light of recent experimental and clinical evidence for neural plasticity. Specifically, adults with amblyopia can improve their perceptual performance via extensive practice on a challenging visual task, and this improvement may transfer to improved visual acuity. Amblyopes achieve this improvement via the mechanisms that have been shown to explain perceptual learning in the normal visual system. It is hypothesized that these same mechanisms account for at least some of the improvement that occurs in the treatment of amblyopia.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

"Crowding" in normal and amblyopic vision assessed with Gaussian and Gabor C's.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent and specificity of crowding in the normal fovea and periphery, and the central field of amblyopes, using "C"-like patterns. In the first experiment we measured the extent of crowding for C-patterns comprised of Gaussian patches, over a range of target sizes using a four-alternative forced-choice (up, down, left, right) method. We found that the extent of foveal crowding is proportional to target size. In contrast, in normal periphery and in the central field of amblyopes, crowding extends over large spatial distances and is not size dependent. Crowding for our stimuli occurred with both same-polarity and opposite polarity patches. To test whether the extended crowding in amblyopia resulted from a shift in the spatial scale of analysis, we measured crowding with band-limited C-patterns (comprised of Gabor patches) in a gap localization task (2-AFC). With band-limited stimuli, and a task that does not involve judging the orientation of the gap, the amblyopic eyes showed crowding over a longer distance than that of normal observers. We also tested the orientation specificity of crowding by varying the orientation of the flanks. In normal fovea, crowding is orientation specific: in amblyopia it is not. While crowding in normal fovea can be explained by simple pattern masking, crowding seen in normal periphery and amblyopes cannot. Instead we suggest that crowding in amblyopic and peripheral vision is a result of extended pooling at a stage following the stage of feature detection.

Amblyopia↗

PubMed2005

Learning letter identification in peripheral vision.

Performance for a variety of visual tasks improves with practice. The purpose of this study was to determine the nature of the processes underlying perceptual learning of identifying letters in peripheral vision. To do so, we tracked changes in contrast thresholds for identifying single letters presented at 10 degrees in the inferior visual field, over a period of six consecutive days. The letters (26 lowercase Times-Roman letters, subtending 1.7 degrees) were embedded within static two-dimensional Gaussian luminance noise, with rms contrast ranging from 0% (no noise) to 20%. We also measured the observers' response consistency using a double-pass method on days 1, 3 and 6, by testing two additional blocks on each of these days at luminance noise of 3% and 20%. These additional blocks were the exact replicates of the corresponding block at the same noise contrast that was tested on the same day. We analyzed our results using both the linear amplifier model (LAM) and the perceptual template model (PTM). Our results showed that following six days of training, the overall reduction (improvement across all noise levels) in contrast threshold for our seven observers averaged 21.6% (range: 17.2-31%). Despite fundamental differences between LAM and PTM, both models show that learning leads to an improvement of the perceptual template (filter) such that the template is more capable of extracting the crucial information from the signal. Results from both the PTM analysis and the double-pass experiment imply that the stimulus-dependent component of the internal noise does not change with learning.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

What is the signal in noise?

Visual perception is limited by both the strength of the neural signals, and by the noise in the visual nervous system; however, little is known about what aspects of the input noise the human visual system is sensitive to, i.e., what is the signal in noise? In order to investigate this question we asked observers to discriminate differences in the strength of one-dimensional white noise. We measured their response consistency and classification images and compared the results with an ideal energy detector. Our results and modelling show that discrimination of noise is limited by the observer's template (i.e., the weighted combination of energy in each stimulus component) plus higher order nonlinearities (systematic noise), and by sources of random internal noise. We found that systematic noise is present only near detection threshold. Surprisingly, we found that the human template is "adaptive"-- its shape depends on the spatial frequency band of the noise-suggesting that sensitivity to spatial noise is not simply determined via passive filtering.

Discrimination, Psychological↗

PubMed2005

"Phase capture" in amblyopia: the influence function for sampled shape.

This study was concerned with what stimulus information humans with amblyopia use to judge the shape of simple objects. We used a string of four Gabor patches to define a contour. A fifth, center patch served as the test pattern. The observers' task was to judge the location of the test pattern relative to the contour. The contour was either a straight line, or an arc with positive or negative curvature. We asked whether phase shifts in the inner or outer pairs of patches distributed along the contour influence the perceived shape. That is, we measured the phase shift influence function. Our results, consistent with previous studies, show that amblyopes are imprecise in shape discrimination, showing elevated thresholds for both lines and curves. We found that amblyopes often make much larger perceptual errors (biases) than do normal observers in the absence of phase shifts. These errors tend to be largest for curved shapes and at large separations. In normal observers, shifting the phase of inner patches of the string by 0.25 cycle results in almost complete phase capture (attraction) at the smallest separation (2 lambda), and the capture effect falls off rapidly with separation. A 0.25 cycle shift of the outer pair of patches has a much smaller effect, in the opposite direction (repulsion). While several amblyopic observers showed reduced capture by the phase of the inner patches, to our surprise, several of the amblyopes were sensitive to the phase of the outer patches. We used linear multiple regression to determine the weights of all cues to the task: the carrier phase of the inner patches, carrier phase of the outer patches and the envelope of the outer patches. Compared to normal observers, some amblyopes show a weaker influence of the phase of the inner patches, and a stronger influence of both the phase and envelope of the outer patches. We speculate that this may be a consequence of abnormal "crowding" of the inner patches by the outer ones.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Second-order spatial summation in amblyopia.

Amblyopes show bilateral loss of sensitivity for second-order (contrast defined) stimuli that can be further suppressed by flanking second-order stimuli (whereas flanks facilitate sensitivity in normal observers). The suppressive flank effect in amblyopes might be explained by abnormal pooling of second-order contrast across visual space. In this study, we investigate whether amblyopes show abnormal second-order spatial summation by measuring contrast detection thresholds for 1c/deg modulations of random noise (stimuli 1-12 cycles) in amblyopic observers, strabismic observers with no visual acuity loss, and normal (control) observers. Non-control observers showed substantial bilateral loss of sensitivity relative to the control observers, as expected. However, all observers showed essentially equal second-order spatial summation: contrast detection threshold decreased with approximately the square root of the number of cycles, and then became independent of size at 6-8 cycles (similar asymptotes). We conclude that the pooling of second-order contrast across visual space is unaffected by amblyopia.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Spatial interactions reveal inhibitory cortical networks in human amblyopia.

Humans with amblyopia have a well-documented loss of sensitivity for first-order, or luminance defined, visual information. Recent studies show that they also display a specific loss of sensitivity for second-order, or contrast defined, visual information; a type of image structure encoded by neurons found predominantly in visual area A18/V2. In the present study, we investigate whether amblyopia disrupts the normal architecture of spatial interactions in V2 by determining the contrast detection threshold of a second-order target in the presence of second-order flanking stimuli. Adjacent flanks facilitated second-order detectability in normal observers. However, in marked contrast, they suppressed detection in each eye of the majority of amblyopic observers. Furthermore, strabismic observers with no loss of visual acuity show a similar pattern of detection suppression. We speculate that amblyopia results in predominantly inhibitory cortical interactions between second-order neurons.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Location coding by the human visual system: multiple topological adaptations in a case of strabismic amblyopia.

Amblyopia, a major cause of vision loss, is a developmental disorder of visual perception commonly associated with strabismus (squint). Although defined by a reduction in visual acuity, severe distortions of perceived visual location are common in strabismic amblyopia. These distortions can help us understand the cortical coding of visual location and its development in normal vision, as well as in amblyopia. The history of retinotopic mapping in the visual cortex highlights the potential impact of amblyopia. Theories of amblyopia include topological disarray of receptors in primary visual cortex, undersampling from the amblyopic eye compared with normal eyes, and the presence of anomalous retinal correspondence or multiple cortical representations of the strabismic fovea. We examined the distortions in a strabismic amblyope, using a pop-out localization task, in which normal observers made errors dependent on the visual context of the stimulus. The localization errors of the strabismic amblyope were abnormal. We found that none of the available theories could fully explain this one patient's localization performance. Instead, the observed behavior suggests that multiple adaptations of the underlying cortical topology are possible simultaneously in different parts of the visual field.

Adult↗