Multiple signals interact in flicker: recursive surround networks

在视觉刺激到达眼睛之前，它们被有意识地感知到，并在其间的视觉通路中被多个电路转换和编码。这些过程微妙地改变了我们对视觉刺激的感知。许多过程无法直接观察到——它们是由非常小的神经元与非常多甚至更小的连接器一起执行的，正是这些复杂互连的整个巢决定了巢的行为方式。确定这些难以接近的过程的一些特征的一种方法是研究依赖于它们的行为。我们的目标是通过对闪烁感知的细致测量来确定人类视觉系统的电路是如何工作的。我们依赖于视觉系统中不同回路之间的相互作用以特有的方式改变视觉信号这一事实。通常，这些相互作用导致闪烁在某些频率相对不太明显，但在其他频率很容易看到。通过在感知测量中寻找这些特征效应，我们可以梳理出不同的潜在视觉回路及其对感知的贡献。在之前的工作中，我们发现了一个令人惊讶的复杂电路，它以几种不同的和意想不到的方式使用来自单个光受体-锥细胞的信号。在这个项目中，我们建议在各种新条件下监测和模拟这些信号，以更多地了解眼睛和大脑是如何工作的。我们充满信心地期望提供对视觉和视觉处理的更深入的理解，这将在视觉研究的其他领域产生重要的好处，并将有助于弥合相对简单的视觉通路模型与我们现在从其他学科学习的视觉系统的复杂结构和功能之间日益扩大的差距。

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.