VS212B

Reading and other resources

• Rodieck, "First steps in seeing"
• Wandell, "Foundations of Vision"
• WEBVISION (online resource)
• Books on reserve in Optometry library:
  • Leo Chalupa and John Werner (2004) The Visual Neurosciences (two volumes)
  • Manfred Fahle and Mark Greenlee (2003) The Neuropsychology of Vision
  • Manfred Fahle and Tomaso Poggio (2002) Perceptual Learning
  • Michael Gazzaniga (2004, 3rd edition) The Cognitive Neurosciences
  • Eric Kandel, James Schwartz, and Tom Jessell (2000, 4th edition) Principles of Neural Science
  • Jeremy Wolfe, et al. (2009, 2nd edition) Sensation and Perception

Syllabus

Week 1 (Olshausen)

• Nov. 2 - The problem of vision; comparative vision; rods and cones.
  • Lecture slides
  • Reading:
    • Land & Fernald paper on Evolution of Eyes,
    • Rodieck: Chapters 3 & 8, plus "Interlude on plotting light intensity" (pp. 151-154)
• Nov. 4 - Photoreceptors; lateral inhibition
  • Lecture slides

Week 2 (Olshausen)

• Nov. 9 - Retinal information processing; scale-invariant sampling lattice
  • Lecture slides
  • Reading:
    • Van Essen & Anderson article on Information Processing Strategies and Pathways in the Primate Visual System
    • Handout on Degrees, radians, retinal size and sampling
    • Useful numbers in vision science
• Lab 1 - simulation of retinal sampling lattice

Week 3 (Olshausen)

• Nov. 16 - Sampling; receptive fields; optic nerve
  • Lecture slides
  • Reading:
    • Rodieck: chapters 12-14
    • Handout on Aliasing
    • Simons et al. paper on induced visual fading
  • Demos:
    • Mach bands
    • Vanishing gray
    • Induced visual fading movie

• Nov. 18 - Redundancy reduction; LGN; visual cortex
  • Lecture slides
  • Reading:
    • Derrington-Krauskopf-Lennie paper on color-opponency in LGN
    • Ruderman et al paper on principal components of color in natural images
    • Olshausen & Field paper on sparse coding of natural images
  • Demos:
    • Spanish castle color after-effect

• Lab 2 - natural image statistics and efficient coding

Week 4 (Silver)

• Nov. 23 - Extrastriate cortex: physiology, anatomy, and neuropsychology
  • Lecture slides
  • Supplemental readings (optional):
    • Chalupa and Werner, Volume 1, Chapter 34, pp. 541-562
    • Fahle and Greenlee, Chapter 7, pp. 210-218
    • Wolfe et al., Chapter 4, pp. 96-101; Chapter 7, pp. 186-187
    • Livingstone and Hubel (1988) "Segregation of form, color, movement, and depth: Anatomy, physiology, and perception" Science 240:740-749
    • Merigan and Maunsell (1993) "How parallel are the primate visual pathways?" Annual Review of Neuroscience 16:369-402
  • Videos from lecture:
    • Luminance illusion
    • Waterfall motion illusion
    • Single unit recording in area MT
    • Locating area MT with fMRI
    • Prosopagnosia
    • Misbinding of color and motion

Week 5 (Silver)

• Nov. 30 - Visual attention
  • Lecture slides
  • Supplemental readings (optional):
    • Fahle and Greenlee, Chapter 7, pp. 218-236
    • Gazzaniga, Chapter 43, pp. 589-606
    • Wolfe et al., Chapter 8, pp. 189-209
    • Pessoa, Kastner, and Ungerleider (2003) "Neuroimaging studies of attention: From modulation of sensory processing to top-down control" Journal of Neuroscience 23:3990-3998
    • Reynolds and Chelazzi (2004) "Attentional modulation of visual processing" Annual Review of Neuroscience 27:611-647
  • Videos from lecture
    • gorilla change blindness demo
    • The Colour Changing Card Trick
    • airplane change blindness demo
    • sphinx change blindness demo
    • Grenoble street scene (you may have trouble viewing this on a Mac)
• Dec. 2 - Imaging methods in visual neuroscience
  • Supplemental readings (optional):
    • Logothetis and Wandell (2004) "Interpreting the BOLD signal" Annual Review of Neuroscience 66:735-769
  • Videos from lecture
    • single cell calcium imaging
    • evoked versus spontaneous activity with voltage-sensitive dyes
    • orientation pinwheels in visual cortex
    • gray/white matter segmentation movie
    • cortical inflation and flattening movie
    • movie of layout of upper right visual field quadrant
    • rotating wedge stimulus used for retinotopic mapping
    • expanding ring stimulus used for retinotopic mapping

Week 6 (Silver)

• Dec. 7 - Visual cortical development and plasticity
  • Supplemental readings (optional):
    • Fahle and Poggio, Introduction, pp. ix-xix
    • Kandel, Schwartz, and Jessell, Chapter 53, pp. 1049-1051; Chapter 54, pp. 1063-1066; Chapter 56, pp. 1115-1127
    • Huberman, Feller, and Chapman (2008) "Mechanisms underlying development of visual maps and receptive fields" Annual Review of Neuroscience 31:479-509
    • Wandell and Smirnakis (2009) "Plasticity and stability of visual field maps in adult primary visual cortex" Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10:873-884