Editorial: Using Noise to Characterize Vision

Editorial: Using Noise to Characterize Vision

Auditory noise is a sound, a random variation in air pressure. More generally, random " noise " can be introduced into any stimulus, including a visual display. Noise added to the stimulus can probe the computations underlying perception of the stimulus. With power and precision, the noise, by restricting the information available, places fundamental constraints on attainable performance and pr...

Using visual noise to characterize amblyopic letter identification.

Amblyopia is a much-studied but poorly understood developmental visual disorder that reduces acuity, profoundly reducing contrast sensitivity for small targets. Here we use visual noise to probe the letter identification process and characterize its impairment by amblyopia. We apply five levels of analysis - threshold, threshold in noise, equivalent noise, optical MTF, and noise modeling - to o...

Using noise to probe and characterize gene circuits.

Stochastic fluctuations (or "noise") in the single-cell populations of molecular species are shaped by the structure and biokinetic rates of the underlying gene circuit. The structure of the noise is summarized by its autocorrelation function. In this article, we introduce the noise regulatory vector as a generalized framework for making inferences concerning the structure and biokinetic rates ...

Editorial: Vision in Cephalopods

To characterize contrast detection, noise should be extended, not localized

Adding noise to a stimulus is useful to characterize visual processing. To avoid triggering a processing strategy shift between the processing in low and high noise, Allard and Cavanagh (2011) recommended using noise that is extended as a function of all dimensions such as space, time, frequency and orientation. Contrariwise, to avoid cross-channel suppression affecting contrast detection, Bake...