The mammalian visual system has been extensively studied since Hubel and Wiesel's work on cortical feature maps in the 1960s. Feature maps representing the cortical neurons' ocular dominance, orientation and direction preferences have been well explored experimentally and computationally. The predominant view has been that direction selectivity (DS) in particular, is a feature entirely dependen...

When a different pattern is presented to each eye, the perceived image spontaneously alternates between the two patterns (binocular rivalry); the dynamics of these bistable alternations are known to be stochastic. Examining multistable binocular rivalry (involving four dominant percepts), we demonstrated path dependence and on-line adaptation, which were equivalent whether perceived patterns we...

Most people prefer to use their right eye for viewing. New evidence reveals that this dominance is much more plastic than that for one hand or foot: it changes from one eye to the other depending on angle of gaze. Remarkably, sighting dominance depends on the hand being directed towards the visual target.

When two moving gratings are superimposed in normal viewing they often combine to form a pattern that moves with a single direction of motion. Here, we investigated whether the same mechanism underlies pattern motion when drifting gratings are presented independently to the two eyes. We report that, with relatively large circular grating patches (4 deg), there are periods of monocular dominance...

We describe a modification to a standard correlation model for the development of the geniculocortical projection that relays visual input to the visual cortex. The modification is to include threshold-activation of cortical cells as opposed to linear activation and it is shown that this can account for topographic map refinement (TMR). This contrasts with other models that require cortical cel...

Two meta-analyses of 66 behavioral studies examined variables influencing functional cerebral lateralization of each language of brain-intact bilingual adults. Functional lateralization was found to be primarily influenced by age of onset of bilingualism: bilinguals who acquired both languages by 6 years of age showed bilateral hemispheric involvement for both languages, whereas those who acqui...

We present an analytical approach for studying the coupled development of ocular dominance and orientation preference columns. Using this approach we demonstrate that ocular dominance segregation can induce the stabilization and even the production of pinwheels by their crystallization in two types of periodic lattices. Pinwheel crystallization depends on the overall dominance of one eye over t...

Dominance and epistatic effects are predicted to be larger in life-history than in morphological traits. We test these predictions using published results from line cross analyses. We find that dominance is found in more than 95% of traits, regardless of the type of trait, but that the magnitude of the effect in relation to the additive effect is much greater in life-history than in morphologic...

powdery mildew, caused by blumeria graminis hordei, is currently the most serious foliar disease of barley in worldwide and reduced barley yield. the use of resistant cultivars is an efficient, economical and environmentally way to control of powdery mildew in barley. in this research a half diallel design was used for genetic analysis of resistance to powdery mildew (bgh) in barley. six barley...