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
  • Supplementary readings (optional):
    • Chalupa and Werner, Volume 1, Chapter 34, pp. 541-562
    • Fahle and Greenlee, Chapter 7, pp. 210-236
    • 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
• Dec. 2 - Imaging methods in visual neuroscience

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