It is known that early sensory deprivation modifies brain functional structure and connectivity. The aim of the present study was to investigate the neuro-functional organization of reading in a patient with profound congenital unilateral deafness. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we compared cortical networks supporting the processing of written words in patient RA (completely deaf in th...

A spot that flickers at 16 Hz between two luminance levels (on a grey surround) has an appearance of metallic lustre, which we call 'monocular lustre'. Binocular and monocular lustre were measured in comparable conditions by a rating procedure, and both were reported only when the light and dark values of the flickering (or binocularly fused) spot straddled the surround luminance, so that the s...

Sleep can facilitate memory formation, but its role in cortical plasticity is poorly understood. A recent study found that sleep, following monocular deprivation (MD), facilitated cortical changes in ocular dominance. The magnitude of plasticity was similar to that observed after continued MD, and larger than that seen after sleep deprivation in darkness, suggesting that sleep per se enables me...

Binocular vision is traditionally treated as two processes: the fusion of similar images, and the interocular suppression of dissimilar images (e.g. binocular rivalry). Recent work has demonstrated that interocular suppression is phase-insensitive, whereas binocular summation occurs only when stimuli are in phase. But how do these processes affect our perception of binocular contrast? We measur...

The rate of women choosing to have a bilateral mastectomy as a treatment for unilateral breast cancer has increased since the 1990s, particularly among younger women. This article describes a qualitative study that was conducted to explore this decision-making process.

We varied the surface boundary-contour properties of binocular rivalry (BR) stimuli to measure the rivalry percept as a function of stimulus duration. Experiment 1 compared perception from BR stimuli with monocular boundary contour (MBC) and binocular boundary contour (BBC). We found global dominance is achieved with stimulus duration as short as 30ms for the MBC rivalry stimuli, whereas it tak...

PURPOSE To explore the neural mechanisms underlying disparity sensitivity in complex cells of the macaque visual cortex, the relationship between interocular receptive field (RF) positional shift and disparity sensitivity was studied in area V1. METHODS Single-unit recordings were made from area V1 of awake Macaca mulatta. Monocular RFs were mapped by means of a reverse cross-correlation tech...

The article aims to test the hypothesis that audiovisual integration can improve spatial hearing in monaural conditions when interaural difference cues are not available. We trained one group of subjects with an audiovisual task, where a flash was presented in parallel with the sound and another group in an auditory task, where only sound from different spatial locations was presented. To check...