The study of space-time vernier (STV) provides information on the spatio-temporal structure of the visual system in the same way that the classical spatio-spatial vernier (SSV) provides information on its spatial structure. The transposition of a SSV task into a STV one yields the following experimental format: an object (in the present case a Gaussian Blob) drifts with a constant velocity, V, ...

A 12-bit Vernier ring time-to-digital converter (TDC) with time resolution of 8 ps for digital-phase-locked-loops (DPLL) is presented. This novel Vernier ring TDC places the Vernier delay cells and arbiters in a ring format and reuses them for the measurement of the input time interval. The proposed TDC thus achieves large detectable range, fine time resolution, small die size and low power con...

BACKGROUND Vision in people with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) is reported to be different from people without ASC, but the neural level at which the differences begin to occur is not yet known. Here we examine two variants of a vernier acuity task to determine if differences are evident in early visual processing. FINDINGS Abutting and separated vernier acuity was assessed in 16 people wi...

In crowding, perception of a target usually deteriorates when flanking elements are presented next to the target. Surprisingly, adding further flankers can lead to a release from crowding. In previous work we showed that, for example, vernier offset discrimination at 9° of eccentricity deteriorated when a vernier was embedded in a square. Adding further squares improved performance. The more sq...

Recently, the Vernier effect has been proved to be very efficient for significantly improving the sensitivity and the limit of detection (LOD) of chemical, biochemical and gas photonic sensors. In this paper a review of compact and efficient photonic sensors based on the Vernier effect is presented. The most relevant results of several theoretical and experimental works are reported, and the th...

How the visual brain integrates temporally dispersed information is an open question. Often, it is assumed that the visual system simply sums light over a certain period of time (e.g. Bloch's law). However, in feature fusion, information presented later dominates, suggesting complex temporal dynamics that cannot be described by simple energy summation. For example, if two verniers are presented...

Orientation selective neurons in the primary visual cortex typically respond to a range of orientations that covers 20 degrees or more, while in psychophysical experiments, orientation bandwidth is often clearly narrower. Here, we measure the orientation specificity of perceptual learning for vernier discriminations. More than 70 observers, in separate groups, practiced a vernier discrimination...

By detection of spatial offsets is meant the ability to indicate whether or not a given (vernier) stimulus has a spatial offset. Discrimination, on the other hand, implies that the direction of offset has been correctly identified. We compared vernier thresholds for these two tasks and found a consistent difference by a factor of around 2 in favour of discrimination. This is to say that observe...

Since the early phenomenological demonstrations of Gestalt principles, one of the major challenges of Gestalt psychology has been to quantify these principles. Here, we show that contextual modulation, i.e. the influence of context on target perception, can be used as a tool to quantify perceptual grouping in the haptic domain, similar to the visual domain. We investigated the influence of targ...

Spatio-temporal interpolation reconstructs the (complete) motion path of objects presented discontinuously, e.g. under stroboscopic illumination or in television. Interpolative vernier stimuli were created by presenting two line segments with a temporal delay instead of a spatial offset. Ten amblyopic patients had to indicate whether the lower segment of the moving target was offset to the left...