Background
It is still up to debate about the role of the primary visual cortex (V1) in visual awareness. In the study done by Lamme and his team in regards to the role of V1 in visual awareness, one of their concluding points presents an uncertainty not explored in the study.
It was shown that visual neurons in early parts of subjects’ responses to stimuli suggested whether they could ‘predict’ if the target could be identified or not. It was left ambiguous as to whether target identification was a correlation of eye movement or a correlate of a visual selection process brought out through a familiarized selection process (Lamme 2015).
Perhaps visual adaptation serves a significant role in visual awareness. Familiar characteristics such…show more content… We will use standard retinotopic mapping methods to analyze the activity from visual areas V1, V2, and V3 from each subject.
We will test two areas in which visual adaptation can be applied to, color and orientation. We will test two groups for the effect of visual adaptation, by response time and visual awareness after or before becoming familiar with the models being shown. We will show the same iteration of stimuli for one subject multiple times, then see the effects on data after either switching the stimuli or keeping it the same.
For color, we will use high frequency flickering luminance stimuli within the ranges of 10-30 Hz. We will modify the hue and grating patterns with slight variations. We know that the V1 neurons are quick to identify disparity, so we will use the stimuli to see if visual adaptation to the same disparity will result in a V1 activity decrease, and increase response time.
For orientation, we will use oriented texture displays that show a certain pattern. Within the display, there will be a smaller central square with the same pattern, but with varying degrees of orientation…show more content… To determine the effect of visual adaptation on response time and visual awareness, we will be using training data to construct to separate data entries for each pair of stimuli. We will also measure the amount of activity from all visual areas in each stimulus category. Then we will use fit models to predict the response times and activity of the visual areas in the test data. If visual adaptation had a significant effect on color perception, we expect that activity in V1 will decrease while V2 and V3 activity will increase. In addition we expect that response time will decrease.
The effects of orientation can be more volatile to predict since some suggest that the synchrony between these orientation differences reflected dynamical associations between the visual areas in which the percepts were combined into coherent objects (Lamme