Cue Reliability and Depth Calibration During Space Perception

描述（由申请人提供）：所提议的工作的长期目标是了解视觉系统的学习如何帮助它在感知过程中表征直接环境。因为感知是准确的，所以我们可以知道空间布局：我们周围物体和表面的形状、方向、大小和空间位置。但这种准确性要求视觉系统随着时间的推移学会如何最好地解释视觉“线索”。这些线索是视觉系统从视网膜图像中提取的来自环境的信号，这些图像提供了关于空间布局的信息。已知的线索包括双目视差、纹理梯度、遮挡关系、运动视差和熟悉的大小等。如何正确地解释这些线索呢？一个根本的问题是视觉线索是模糊的。即使线索可以精确测量（这是不可能的，因为视觉系统是一种物理设备），对于给定的一组线索，仍然会有不同的可能的3D解释。因此，视觉系统被迫以概率的方式运作：我们对事物“看起来”的方式反映了一种隐含的猜测，即对线索的哪种解释最有可能是正确的。每一个额外的提示都有助于提高猜测。例如，一扇门的视网膜图像可以被解释为一个垂直的矩形，或者在空间中是非垂直方向的其他四边形，而门底部的阴影提示帮助系统知道它是一个垂直的矩形。视觉系统使用什么机制来辨别哪些线索可用于正确解释图像？提出的工作旨在回答这个关于感知学习的基本问题。最近的研究表明，视觉系统可以检测并开始使用新的感知线索。这种现象可以在实验室中使用经典条件反射程序来研究，这种程序以前是用来研究动物的学习能力的。在提出的实验中，模型系统用于了解学习发生的时间和学习内容的细节。这些数据将与基于动物学习文献中较早的类似研究的预测进行比较，并在贝叶斯统计推断，特别是机器学习理论的背景下进行解释。这项提议的工作通过描述保持视觉感知准确的大脑机制而有益于公众健康。这些机制在先天性白内障患者摘除白内障后学习使用视力的几个月里发挥作用，当一个有联觉或自闭症家族史的人发展出异常的依赖经验的知觉反应时，这些机制可能会出错。神经退行性疾病可能会破坏视觉学习，在这种情况下，视觉学习测试可以用来检测疾病；了解人类视觉中新线索的学习可以为视障人士提供更好的计算机辅助；了解是什么导致新的线索被学习，可能会带来新的技术，训练人们在新的工作环境中准确地感知。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The long-term objective of the proposed work is to understand how learning by the visual system helps it to represent the immediate environment during perception. Because perception is accurate, we can know spatial layout: the shapes, orientations, sizes, and spatial locations of the objects and surfaces around us. But this accuracy requires that the visual system learn over time how best to interpret visual "cues". These cues are the signals from the environment that the visual system extracts from the retinal images that are informative about spatial layout. Known cues include binocular disparity, texture gradients, occlusion relations, motion parallax, and familiar size, to name a few. How do these cues come to be interpreted correctly? A fundamental problem is that visual cues are ambiguous. Even if cues could be measured exactly (which they cannot, the visual system being a physical device) there would still be different possible 3D interpretations for a given set of cues. As a result, the visual system is forced to operate probabilistically: the way things "look" to us reflects an implicit guess as to which interpretation of the cues is most likely to be correct. Each additional cue helps improve the guess. For example, the retinal image of a door could be interpreted as a vertical rectangle or as some other quadrilateral at a non-vertical orientation in space, and the shadow cues at the bottom of the door helps the system know that it's a vertical rectangle. What mechanisms do the visual system use to discern which cues are available for interpreting images correctly? The proposed work aims to answer this fundamental question about perceptual learning. It was recently shown that the visual system can detect and start using new cues for perception. This phenomenon can be studied in the laboratory using classical conditioning procedures that were previously developed to study learning in animals. In the proposed experiments, a model system is used to understand details about when this learning occurs and what is learned. The data will be compared to predictions based on older, analogous studies in the animal learning literature, and interpreted in the context of Bayesian statistical inference, especially machine learning theory. The proposed work benefits public health by characterizing the brain mechanisms that keep visual perception accurate. These mechanisms are at work in the many months during which a person with congenital cataracts learns to use vision after the cataracts are removed, and it is presumably these mechanisms that go awry when an individual with a family history of synesthesia or autism develops anomalous experience-dependent perceptual responses. Neurodegenerative diseases may disrupt visual learning, in which case visual learning tests could be used to detect disease; understanding the learning of new cues in human vision could lead to better computerized aids for the visually impaired; and knowing what causes a new cue to be learned could lead to new technologies for training people to perceive accurately in novel work environments.