Thick Visual Cortex in the Early Blind

Thick visual cortex in the early blind.

We investigated the key neurodevelopmental factors that determine cortical thickness, namely synaptogenesis and regression, by analyzing the thickness of the visual cortex in humans with early- and late-onset blindness. The bilateral visual cortices of the early blind were significantly thicker than those of the late blind and the sighted controls, but the latter two groups did not differ signi...

Visual cortex activity in early and late blind people.

Computations in the early visual cortex.

This paper reviews some of the recent neurophysiological studies that explore the variety of visual computations in the early visual cortex in relation to geometric inference, i.e. the inference of contours, surfaces and shapes. It attempts to draw connections between ideas from computational vision and findings from awake primate electrophysiology. In the classical feed-forward, modular view o...

Visual Perception: Early Visual Cortex Fills in the Gaps

A new human fMRI study shows how early visual cortex makes sense of complex visual scenes by segregating foreground and background, and by highlighting outlier objects. The findings are consistent with two attractive theories: biased competition and predictive coding.

Primed-burst potentiation in adult rat visual cortex in vitro

  The effectiveness of θ pattern primed-bursts (PBs) on development of primed-burst (PB) potentiation was investigated in layer II/III of the adult rat visual cortex in vitro. Experiments were carried out in the visual cortical slices. Population excitatory post-synaptic potentials (pEPSPs) were evoked in layer II/III by stimulation of either white mater or layer IV. To induce long-term potenti...