 |
Member-Initiated Symposia
2009 Symposia ARVO@VSS: Advances in Understanding the Structure and Function of the Retina Common mechanisms in Time and Space perception Retinotopic and Non-retinotopic Information Representation and Processing in Human Vision Modern Approaches to Modeling Visual Data
|
Member-Initiated SymposiaMember-initiated symposia will take place at the start of this year's 2009. Three symposia will be held at two time slots. Pre-registration is not necessary, but rooms WILL fill up so you should plan to arrive early. Friday, May 8, 1:00 - 3:00 pm ARVO@VSS: Advances in Understanding the Structure and Function of the RetinaOrganizer: Donald Hood In the last 5 to 10 years, we have seen major advances in our understanding the structure and function of the primate retina. The first two speakers will summarize the advances in our understanding of the anatomy and physiology of the primate retina. The last two talks will review the recent advances in using optical imaging (adaptive optics) and structural imaging (optical coherence tomography) to study the human retina in vivo. Common mechanisms in Time and Space perceptionOrganizer: David Eagleman Most of the actions our brains carry out on a daily basis (e.g., speaking, walking, determining causality and decoding sensory information) require timing on the scale of tens to hundreds of milliseconds. New discoveries from electrophysiology, psychophysics, fMRI and computational modeling will be shored together to understand how neural signals in different brain regions may encode both time and space. Is number visual? Is vision numerical? Investigating the relationship between visual representations and the property of magnitudeOrganizer: Michael C. Frank The ability to manipulate exact numbers is a signature human achievement, supporting activities like building bridges, designing computers, and conducting economic transactions. Underlying this ability and supporting its acquisition is an evolutionarily-conserved mechanism for the manipulation of approximate quantity: the analog magnitude system. Our symposium asks both how magnitude representations are integrated into visual processing and how visual processing in turn forms a basis for the acquisition and processing of exact number. As a case study of cognition, number provides the potential for both quick progress towards well-defined goals and deep insights into the nature of human knowledge.
Friday, May 8, 3:30 - 5:30 pm Dynamic Processes in VisionOrganizer: Jonathan D. Victor Given the obviously spatial nature of vision, it is often tempting to ignore dynamics, and to focus on spatial processing and maps. However, dynamics are in fact crucial: even for processes that appear to be intrinsically spatial, the underlying mechanism often resides in the time course of neural activity. This symposium will bring together four leading neurophysiologists whose studies in areas in areas of key functional importance exemplify this theme: retinal ganglion cell population coding, striate cortical mechanisms of contrast sensitivity regulation, extrastriate cortical analysis of shape, and frontal and collicular gaze control mechanisms. Retinotopic and Non-retinotopic Information Representation and Processing in Human VisionOrganizers: Haluk Ogmen and Michael H. Herzog Due to the movements of the eyes and those of the objects, natural vision is highly dynamic. The analysis of dynamic vision requires an understanding of reference frames and how retinotopic representations are transformed into more complex non-retinotopic representations. The symposium will provide a timely review and discussion based on the recent convergence of a variety of techniques in elucidating the roles of retinotopic and non-retinotopic representations during eye movement and fixation periods. Since non-retinotopic representations have implications for a broad range of visual functions, we expect this symposium to be of interest to the general VSS audience. Modern Approaches to Modeling Visual DataOrganizer: Kenneth Knoblauch The underlying model of many psychophysical tasks is a signal detection paradigm in which the observer classifies stimulus events according to a decision rule based on a linear model. The growth of computing power and the availability of software for simplifying the overhead of setting up models has permitted the implementation of more computationally intensive parametric and nonparametric approaches based on modern statistical methods, machine learning and data mining. The presentations will outline how these approaches have been adapted to a variety of psychophysical tasks, including psychometric function fitting, classification, difference scaling, conjoint measurement, face perception and visual saliency.
|