Neural compensation for the eye's optical aberrations.

By P. Artal, Li Chen, E. Fernández, B. Singer, S. Manzanera, David Williams. Journal of Vision, 2004

330 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A fundamental problem facing sensory systems is to recover useful information about the external world from signals that are corrupted by the sensory process itself. Retinal images in the human eye are affected by optical aberrations that cannot be corrected with ordinary spectacles or contact lenses, and the specific pattern of these aberrations is different in every eye. Though these aberrations always blur the retinal image, our subjective impression is that the visual world is sharp and clear, suggesting that the brain might compensate for their subjective influence. The recent introduction of adaptive optics to control the eye's aberrations now makes it possible to directly test this idea. If the brain compensates for the eye's aberrations, vision should be clearest with the eye's own aberrations rather than with unfamiliar ones. We asked subjects to view a stimulus through an adaptive optics system that either recreated their own aberrations or a rotated version of them. For all five subjects tested, the stimulus seen with the subject's own aberrations was always sharper than when seen through the rotated version. This supports the hypothesis that the neural visual system is adapted to the eye's aberrations, thereby removing somehow the effects of blur generated by the sensory apparatus from visual experience. This result could have important implications for methods to correct higher order aberrations with customized refractive surgery because some benefits of optimizing the correction optically might be undone by the nervous system's compensation for the old aberrations.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Cognitive Neuroscience, Epidemiology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3756b3bf93f901874304e5486a510f76e666eabe

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Citations in the corpus

Homeostasis of eye growth and the question of myopia. (2004, neutral): “, 2002), as well as a compensation for the high-order optical aberrations of one's own eye (Artal et al., 2004).”
Adaptation and visual coding (2011, background): “Both short- and long-term adaptation can result from the actual patterns of blur resulting from the eye’s optics, including low-order aberrations of defocus and astigmatism as well as high-order aberrations (Artal et al., 2004; Sawides et al., 2010).”
Visual field map clusters in human cortex (2005, background): “Hence, it is possible to test the hypothesis that the source of the V1 area variation begins with the determination of cone density (Roorda & Williams 1999; Artal et al. 2004).”