Dataset Information

Visual field asymmetries vary between children and adults.

ABSTRACT: Visual perception in human adults varies throughout the visual field, both across eccentricity - decreasing with distance from the center of gaze - and around isoeccentric locations - that is, with polar angle at a constant distance from the center of gaze. At isoeccentric locations, the same visual information yields better performance along the horizontal than vertical meridian (horizontal-vertical anisotropy, HVA) and along the lower than upper vertical meridian (vertical-meridian asymmetry, VMA). These perceptual polar angle asymmetries in adults have been well characterized. Poor perception at upper visual field locations would be particularly detrimental to children: in their perceptual world, given their height, many important events occur above eye level. Developmental aspects of visual perception have been well characterized¹, and some basic dimensions, such as contrast sensitivity, continue to develop through childhood², but there is no research on polar angle asymmetries before adulthood. Here, we investigated whether these asymmetries are present in children, and if so, whether they differ from those of adults. We found clear differences between children and adults in performance around the visual field: the HVA is less pronounced and the VMA is not present for children.

SUBMITTER: Carrasco M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9278050 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Visual field asymmetries vary between children and adults.

Carrasco Marisa M Roberts Mariel M Myers Caroline C Shukla Lavanya L

Current biology : CB 20220601 11

Visual perception in human adults varies throughout the visual field, both across eccentricity - decreasing with distance from the center of gaze - and around isoeccentric locations - that is, with polar angle at a constant distance from the center of gaze. At isoeccentric locations, the same visual information yields better performance along the horizontal than vertical meridian (horizontal-vertical anisotropy, HVA) and along the lower than upper vertical meridian (vertical-meridian asymmetry, ...[more]

PMID: 35671720

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Project description:Visual performance varies around the visual field. It is best near the fovea compared to the periphery, and at iso-eccentric locations it is best on the horizontal, intermediate on the lower, and poorest on the upper meridian. The fovea-to-periphery performance decline is linked to the decreases in cone density, retinal ganglion cell (RGC) density, and V1 cortical magnification factor (CMF) as eccentricity increases. The origins of polar angle asymmetries are not well understood. Optical quality and cone density vary across the retina, but recent computational modeling has shown that these factors can only account for a small percentage of behavior. Here, we investigate how visual processing beyond the cone photon absorptions contributes to polar angle asymmetries in performance. First, we quantify the extent of asymmetries in cone density, midget RGC density, and V1 CMF. We find that both polar angle asymmetries and eccentricity gradients increase from cones to mRGCs, and from mRGCs to cortex. Second, we extend our previously published computational observer model to quantify the contribution of phototransduction by the cones and spatial filtering by mRGCs to behavioral asymmetries. Starting with photons emitted by a visual display, the model simulates the effect of human optics, cone isomerizations, phototransduction, and mRGC spatial filtering. The model performs a forced choice orientation discrimination task on mRGC responses using a linear support vector machine classifier. The model shows that asymmetries in a decision maker's performance across polar angle are greater when assessing the photocurrents than when assessing isomerizations and are greater still when assessing mRGC signals. Nonetheless, the polar angle asymmetries of the mRGC outputs are still considerably smaller than those observed from human performance. We conclude that cone isomerizations, phototransduction, and the spatial filtering properties of mRGCs contribute to polar angle performance differences, but that a full account of these differences will entail additional contribution from cortical representations.

Dataset Information

Visual field asymmetries vary between children and adults.

Publications

Visual field asymmetries vary between children and adults.

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