Deciphering the elemental building blocks of visual appearance

视觉是一系列复杂的物理和生理事件的产物。虽然视觉通路的一些孤立阶段已经得到很好的理解，但研究物理刺激和感知之间的直接联系仍然是视觉科学的挑战之一。在人类中，视网膜感光器马赛克的激活构成了视觉信号的细胞进入点。要分离出单个细胞对整体感受器的贡献是很困难的，因为在正常的观察中，在任何给定的时刻都有成千上万的光感受器受到刺激。此外，精确的实验访问受到光学缺陷和眼睛不断运动的阻碍。自适应光学微刺激的最新进展，然而，现在有可能在活体视网膜中的单个感光细胞进行孤立的功能testing. In这里，我们问在多大程度上每个单独的感光细胞有助于视觉感知，如果元素细胞信号也实例化的感知元素。只有一个感光器的视觉效果如何？当刺激更复杂时，这些基本的感知联合收割机又是如何结合和相互作用的？我们将通过高度控制的单（和多）细胞刺激及其引起的主观外观的直接映射来解决这些问题。虽然单细胞刺激和外观之间的微观映射是迄今为止完全未知的，也缺乏对宏观层面上的刺激和外观之间的关系的理解，即空间扩展刺激的更自然的条件。原因之一是，到目前为止，视觉研究的大部分都是使用性能指标，如视觉敏锐度或敏感度，来研究视觉刺激的检测或区分程度，而不是它们的主观表现。然而，为了理解视觉空间感知的潜在机制，重要的是要精确地描述系统的中心输出之一-视觉外观。在这里，我们将结合联合收割机的微观和宏观捕捉的视觉外观，所有的方式，从单一的锥在中央凹的大阵列的锥在周边。为此，我们将开发新的程序，以准确地量化主观的外观，并应用这些方法在一些范式，已知改变刺激外观。通过在大范围的行为实验中将尖端的高分辨率光学刺激技术与新颖的基于外观的心理物理学方法相结合，我们的目标是揭示视觉空间感知的基本组成部分。

Seeing is a product of a complex physical and physiological chain of events. While some isolated stages of the visual pathway are well understood, studying the direct link between the physical stimulus and perception remains one of the challenges in vision science. In humans, the activation of the retinal photoreceptor mosaic constitutes the cellular entry point of the visual signal. To isolate the single cell contribution to the overall percept is difficult, because in normal viewing, tens of thousands of photoreceptors are stimulated at any given moment. Moreover, precise experimental access is hindered by the optical imperfections and the constant movement of the eye. Recent advances in adaptive optics micro-stimulation, however, now make it possible to target single photoreceptor cells in the living retina for isolated function testing.Here, we ask in how far each individual photoreceptor contributes to the visual percept and if elemental cellular signals also instantiate perceptual elements. How does it look to see with only a single photoreceptor, and how do these elemental percepts combine and interact when stimuli are more complex? We will tackle these questions by direct mapping of highly controlled single (and multiple) cell stimulation and the subjective appearances they elicit. While the microscopic mapping between single cell stimulation and appearance is to-date entirely unknown, there is also a lack of understanding of the relation between stimulus and appearance on a macroscopic level, i.e. the more natural condition of spatially extended stimuli. One reason is that by far the largest part of vision research uses performance measures, like visual acuity or sensitivity, to study how well visual stimuli can be detected or discriminated, but not how they appear subjectively. To understand the underlying mechanisms of visual space perception, however, it is important to have a precise account of one of the central outputs of the system — visual appearance. Here, we will combine micro and macro captures of visual appearance, all the way from the single cone in the fovea to large arrays of cones in the periphery. To this end, we will develop novel procedures to accurately quantify subjective appearance and apply these methods in a number of paradigms that are known to alter stimulus appearance. By combining cutting-edge high-resolution optical stimulation techniques with novel appearance-based psychophysical methods in a large range of behavioral experiments, we aim to uncover the elemental building blocks of visual space perception.