To understand how activity in mammalian neural circuits controls behavior, the mouse is a promising model system due to the convergence of genetic, optical, and physiological methods. The ability to control and quantify behavior precisely is also essential for these studies. We developed an operant visual detection paradigm to make visual psychophysical measurements: head-fixed mice make respon...

Contrast thresholds for 75% correct depth identification in narrow-band filtered random dot stereograms were determined for different center spatial frequencies and binocular disparities. Rigorous control over vergence was maintained during testing, and a forced-choice procedure was used. The resulting contrast sensitivity function for stereopsis revealed sensitivity over a greater range of dis...

The effects of 0.15% quasi steady-state end-tidal isoflurane on the contrast sensitivity of five healthy volunteers were investigated by measuring their performance in computer generated letter discrimination tasks. A series of letters were displayed on a computer screen so that the luminance of the letter differed from that of the background. Two protocols were used: in the static protocol, th...

Previously, we have shown that humans with amblyopia exhibit deficits for global motion discrimination that cannot be simply ascribed to a reduction in visibility or contrast sensitivity. Deficits exist in the processing of global motion in the fronto-parallel plane that suggest reduced extra-striate function (i.e., MT) in amblyopia. Here, we ask whether such a deficit also exists for rotation ...

Single letter and linear acuity (near and distance) and contrast sensitivity were measured in 15 amblyopes (ages 5 to 12) before, during, and after four weekly 7 min sessions of CAM treatment. Six of the children, however, played games over a homogeneous grey disc having the same space-averaged luminance as that of the striped stimuli. Experimental and controls results were indistinguishable. I...

Developmental dyslexia is a specific reading disability that affects 5-10% of the population. Recent studies have suggested that dyslexics may experience a deficit in the visual magnocellular pathway. The most extensively studied prediction deriving from this hypothesis is impaired contrast sensitivity to transient, low-luminance stimuli at low spatial frequencies. However, the findings are inc...

Contrast sensitivity (CS) is widely used as a measure of visual function in both basic research and clinical evaluation. There is conflicting evidence on the extent to which measuring the full contrast sensitivity function (CSF) offers more functionally relevant information than a single measurement from an optotype CS test, such as the Pelli-Robson chart. Here we examine the relationship betwe...

PURPOSE We examined the relationship between visual field extent and driving performance in an open, on-road environment using a detailed scoring method that assessed the quality of specific skills for a range of maneuvers. The purpose was to determine which maneuvers and skills should be included in future, larger scale investigations of the effect of peripheral field loss on driving performan...

A major assumption underlying the use of contrast sensitivity testing is that it predicts whether a patient has difficulty seeing objects encountered in everyday life. However, there has been no large-scale attempt to examine whether this putative relationship actually exists. We have examined this assumption using a clinic based sample of adults aged 20-77 years. Contrast thresholds were measu...

The contrast sensitivity of the human eye has been measured as a function of eccentricity. The stimulus used was a sine-wave grating with a fixed height of 5’. in a surround of luminance that equals the average stimulus luminance. The measurements were carried out with stimulus width as the independent variable. The “local’. sensitivity for gratings was found to decrease monotonically with incr...