General Psychology: Visual System

Objective: To discuss further and to know how important the visual system is.

Vision: Light
y Light or visible light is electromagnetic

radiation that is visible to the human eye, and is responsible for the sense of sight. y The medium of illumination that makes sight possible.

Vision

Vision: Visible spectrum

y The visible spectrum is based on the human visual

system. y Other species of animals would undoubtedly define the visible spectrum differently.

Vision: The eye and its functions

Vision: the eye and its functions

Vision: the eye and its functions

help keep foreign matter from falling into the open eye. y Eyebrows prevent sweat on the forehead from dripping into the eyes. y Reflex mechanism provides additional protection, the sudden approach of an object toward the face or a touch on the surface of the eye causes automatic eyelid closure and withdrawal of the head..
y Eye lids and Eye lashes

Vision: the eye and its functions

y Cornea- forms a bulge at the front of the eye and

admits light. y Sclera- A tough white membrane that coats the rest of the eye. y Iris- consist of two bands of muscles that controls the amount of light admitted to the eye. y Aqueous humor- watery fluid constantly produced by the tissue behind the cornea that filters the fluid from the blood.

Vision: the eye and its functions

y glaucoma- disease caused by the malfunction of the

aqueous humor. y Accomodation- the change in the shape of the lens to adjust for distance. y Retina- light sensitive tissue lining in the inner surface of the eye. y Photoreceptors- specialized neurons that transduce light into neural activity.

Vision

Vision
y Rods
y Allow humans to see in black, white, and shades of

gray in dim light y Mostly in the periphery y Take 20 30 minutes to fully adapt to darkness

y Cones
y Enable humans to see color and fine detail in adequate

light, but that do not function in dim light y Mostly in the fovea y Adapt fully to darkness in 2 3 minutes

Vision
y Trichromatic theory
y First proposed by Thomas Young in 1802 and modified

by Hermann von Helmholtz about 50 years later y The theory of color vision suggesting that there are three types of cones, which are maximally sensitive to red, green, or blue, and that varying levels of activity in these receptors can produce all of the colors

Vision
Three Types of Cones

S-Cones (Sensitive to blue)

M-Cones (Sensitive to Green)

L-Cones (Sensitive to Red)

Vision: the eye and its functions

y Johannes Kepler is credited with suggesting that the

retina, not the lens, contained the receptive tissue of the eye. y Christoph Scheiner that the lens is simply a focusing device.

Vision: the eye and its functions

y Light passes successively through the ganglion layer

(Front), the bipolar cell (middle), and the photoreceptor layer (back). y Early anatomist were surprised to find the photoreceptors in the deepest layer of the retina. As you might expect, the cells that are located above the photoreceptors are Transparent.

Vision: the eye and its functions

Photoreceptors

Bipolar cell

Ganglion cell

Brain

Vision
y Hue
y The property of light commonly referred to as color,

determined primarily by the wavelength of light reflected from a surface

y Saturation
y The degree to which light waves producing a color are

of the same wavelength; the purity of a color

y Brightness
y The dimension of visual sensation that is dependent

on the intensity of light reflected from a surface and that corresponds to the amplitude of the light wave

Vision
y Opponent-process theory
y The theory that three classes of cells increase their

firing rate to signal one color and decrease their firing rate to signal the opposing color (red/green, yellow/blue, white/black)

Afterimage
After you have stared at one color in an opponentprocess pair (red/green, yellow/blue, black/white), the cell responding to that color tires and the opponent cell begins to fire, producing the afterimage

Vision

Transudaction of light by photoreceptors

y The chemistry is essentially the same in all species: A

molecule derived from vitamin A is central ingredient in the transduction of energy of light into neural activity. y Photopigments are unstable pigments that undergo a chemical change when they absorb light. y Photopigments a special pigment found in the rods and cones of the retina

Transudaction of light by photoreceptors

y Rhodopsin, also known as visual purple, is a biological

pigment of the retina that is responsible for both the formation of thephotoreceptor cells and the first events in the perception of light

Adaptation to light and Dark

Adaptation to light and Dark

y adaptation is the ability of the eye to adjust to various

levels of darkness and light.

y The detection of light requires that photons split molecules of

rhodopsin or one of the other photopigments. y When High level of illumination strike the retina the rate of regeneration of rhodopsins falls behindthe rate of the bleaching process. y Insufficiency of adaptation most commonly presents as insufficient adaptation to dark environment, called night blindness or nyctalopia. The opposite problem, known as hemeralopia, that is, inability to see clearly in bright light, is much rarer.

When you look at this picture close range you see Albert Einstein.

Now stand up and take several steps back, roughly 15 feet away, It will become... Marilyn Monroe.

Eye movements
y Fixation pointthe point in the visual field that is fixated by the two eyes in normal vision and for each eye is the point that directly st imulates the fovea of the retina. y Stabilized Images are images on the retina that are unaffected by microsaccade or ocular microtremor. y

Eye movements
y The disappearance of the stabilized image suggests that certain elements of the visual system are not responsive to an unchanging stimulus. Retinal process may cease to respond to a constant stimulus. The small, involuntary movements of our eyes keep the image moving and thus keep the visual system responsive to the details of the scene before us. Without these involuntary muscles, our vision would become blurry soon after we fixed our gazed on a single point and our eyes became still.

Eye movements
y The Eyes also make three types of nonrandom movements: y Conjugate movements y Saccadic movements y Pursuit movements

Eye movements
y Conjugate movements:

both eyes remain fixed on the same target- or more precisely, such movements keep the image of the target object focused on corresponding parts of two retinas.

Eye movements
y Saccadic movements

You shift your gaze abruptly from one point to another. y Scialfa and Joffe found tthat these movements are important to the way we search for a visual object. y Ross and Ma-Wyatt have suggested that saccadic movements help us remember the spatial relationships between objects in our visual field.

Eye movements
y These tracking movements, which follow the

object and project its image onto fovea are called pursuit movements

Colour Vision
y Spectral colors- the colors we see in a rainbow, which

contains the entire spectrum of visible radiant energy. y Wave length is related to colour but the terms are not synonymous.
y The spectral colors do not include all the colours that we can see, such

as brown, pink and the metallic colours silver and gold. The fact that not all colours are found in the spectrum means that differences in wave length alone do not account for the differences in the colour that we can perceive.

Dimensions of color
y Hue
y The property of light commonly referred to as color,

determined primarily by the wavelength of light reflected from a surface

y Saturation
y The degree to which light waves producing a color are of

the same wavelength; the purity of a color

y Brightness
y The dimension of visual sensation that is dependent on

the intensity of light reflected from a surface and that corresponds to the amplitude of the light wave

Dimensions of colour
Physical dimensions of colour: y Wave length y Intensity y Purity

Dimensions of colour

Colour mixing
y Vision can be considered a synthetic sensory modality. That is, Vision synthesizes (puts together) rather than analyzes (takes apart). y The addition of two or more lights of different wave lengths is called color mixing.

Colour coding in the retina

y Thomas Young (1773-1829), a British physicist and

Physician, noted that the human visual system can synthesized any colour from almost any set of three colours of different wavelengths. Young proposed a trichomatric theory.

Colour coding in the retina

y Experiments in recent years have shown that the cones

in the human eye do contain three types of photopigments, each of which preferentially absorbs light of a particular wavelength: 420,530,560 nm. Although these wavelengths actually correspond to blue-violet, green, yellow-green. y Ewald Hering(1834-1918), a german psychologist noted that the four primary hues appeared to belong to pairs of opposing colours: red/green, and yellow/blue.

State the colour not the word!

Colour coding in the retina

y Hering s hypothesis about the nature of photoreceptors was wrong, but he accurately described the characteristics of the information the retinal ganglion cells sends to the brain. y Two types of ganglion cells encode colour vision: red/green cells and yellow/blue cells. y The colour opponent process is a colour theory that states that the human visual system interprets information about colour by processing signals from cones and rods in an antagonistic manner.

Negative afterimage
y An afterimage or ghost image or image burn-in is

an optical illusion that refers to an image continuing to appear in one's vision after the exposure to the original image has ceased.

Negative afterimage
y The most important cause of negative afterimage is

the adaptation in the rate of firing of retinal ganglion cells that occurs during prolonged exposure to the original stimulus. y One type of contigent color aftereffect was discovered by Celeste McCollough in 1965.

Defects in Colour Vision

y Approximately 1 in 20 males has some form of defective or anomalous colour vision. This defects are sometimes called colour blindness.

Type of defective colour vision: y Red/Green system- people with this defects confuse red and green. Their primary colour sensation are yellow and blue. Protanopia- most common defect in colour vision, appears to result from a lack of photopigment for red cones. Deuteranopia-(2nd color defect)appears to result from the opposit kind of substitution: green cones are filled with red photopigment. Tritanopia- involves the yellow/blue system.