Multiple signals interact in flicker: recursive surround networks

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Before visual stimuli arriving at the eye are consciously perceived they are transformed and encoded by multiple circuits in the intervening visual pathways. These processes subtly alter our perception of visual stimuli. Many of the processes cannot be directly observed - they are carried out by very small neurons with a very large number of even smaller connectors and it is the whole nest of these complex interconnections that determine the way the nest behaves. One way to determine some of the characteristics of these inaccessible processes is to study behaviour that depends on them. Our aim is to determine how the circuitry of the human visual system works through careful perceptual measurements of flicker perception. We rely on the fact that interactions between different circuits within the visual system alter visual signals in characteristic ways. Typically, these interactions cause flicker to be relatively less visible at some frequencies but easy to see at other frequencies. By looking for those characteristic effects in perceptual measurements, we can tease apart the different underlying visual circuits and their contributions to perception. In previous work, we discovered a surprisingly complex circuitry that uses the signals from the individual light receptors-cones-in several different and unexpected ways. In this project, we propose to monitor and model those signals under a variety of new conditions to understand more about how the eye and brain work. We confidently expect to provide a greater understanding of vision and visual processing, which will yield important benefits in other areas of vision research, and will help to bridge the widening gap between relatively simple models of the visual pathways and what we are now learning about the complex structure and function of the visual system from other disciplines.