Person:

Bex, Peter

Background: Identification of visual field loss in people with retinal disease is not straightforward as people with eye disease are frequently unaware of substantial deficits in their visual field, as a consequence of perceptual completion (“filling-in”) of affected areas. Methodology: We attempted to induce a compelling visual illusion known as the induced twinkle after-effect (TwAE) in eight patients with retinal scotomas. Half of these patients experience filling-in of their scotomas such that they are unaware of the presence of their scotoma, and conventional campimetric techniques can not be used to identify their vision loss. The region of the TwAE was compared to microperimetry maps of the retinal lesion. Principal Findings: Six of our eight participants experienced the TwAE. This effect occurred in three of the four people who filled-in their scotoma. The boundary of the TwAE showed good agreement with the boundary of lesion, as determined by microperimetry. Conclusion: For the first time, we have determined vision loss by asking patients to report the presence of an illusory percept in blind areas, rather than the absence of a real stimulus. This illusory technique is quick, accurate and not subject to the effects of filling-in.

Summary: Crowding is the breakdown in object recognition that occurs in cluttered visual environments and the fundamental limit on peripheral vision, affecting identification within many visual modalities and across large spatial regions. Though frequently characterized as a disruptive process through which object representations are suppressed or lost altogether, we demonstrate that crowding systematically changes the appearance of objects. In particular, target patches of visual noise that are surrounded (“crowded”) by oriented Gabor flankers become perceptually oriented, matching the flankers. This was established with a change-detection paradigm: under crowded conditions, target changes from noise to Gabor went unnoticed when the Gabor orientation matched the flankers (and the illusory target percept), despite being easily detected when they differed. Rotation of the flankers (leaving target noise unaltered) also induced illusory target rotations. Blank targets led to similar results, demonstrating that crowding can induce apparent structure where none exists. Finally, adaptation to these stimuli induced a tilt aftereffect at the target location, consistent with signals from the flankers “spreading” across space. These results confirm predictions from change-based models of crowding, such as averaging, and establish crowding as a regularization process that simplifies the peripheral field by promoting consistent appearance among adjacent objects.