Many constraint problems exhibit dominance relations which can be exploited for dramatic reductions in search space. Dominance relations are a generalization of symmetry and conditional symmetry. However, unlike symmetry breaking which is relatively well studied, dominance breaking techniques are not very well understood and are not commonly applied. In this paper, we present formal definitions...

Cerebral lateralization is an evolutionarily ancient adaptation, apparently ubiquitous among vertebrates. Despite demonstrated advantages of having a more lateralized brain, substantial variability in the strength of lateralization exists within most species. The underlying reasons for the maintenance of this variation are largely unknown. Here, we present evidence that the strength of laterali...

In the cat, areas 17 and 18 have 2 main cortical targets: area 19 and a large region of suprasylvian cortex, referred to here as the Clare-Bishop area (Hubel and Wiesel, 1969). The functional organization of the latter area is not well understood. It seems likely that its organization reflects, in part, the organization of its inputs from areas 17 and 18, and I therefore studied the functional ...

The exploitation of dominance relations in constraint optimization problems can lead to dramatic reductions in search space. We propose an automatic method to detect some of the dominance relations manually identified by Chu and Stuckey for optimization problems, and to construct the associated dominance breaking constraints. Experimental results show that the method is able to find several dom...

We previously designed a push-pull perceptual training protocol that effectively reduces sensory eye dominance (SED) and enhances binocular depth detection in human adults (Xu, He, & Ooi, 2010a). During the training, an attention cue precedes a pair of binocular competitive stimulus to induce dominance of the weak eye and suppression of the strong eye. To verify that the success of the protocol...

One goal of the experiment presented here was to check, in children, the relationship between eye preference when sighting at different angles and eye dominance in binocular rivalry. In addition, since it is sometimes argued that a crossed pattern of eye-hand preference might put children at risk of difficulties in learning to read, we evaluated the relationship between this pattern and reading...

Several factors may interact to determine the periodicity of ocular dominance stripes in cat and monkey visual cortex. Previous theoretical work has suggested roles for the width of cortical interactions and the strength of between-eye correlations. Here, a model based on an explicit optimization is presented that allows a thorough characterization of how these and other parameters of the affer...

Recent evidence in natural and semi-natural settings has revealed a variety of left-right perceptual asymmetries among vertebrates. These include preferential use of the left or right visual hemifield during activities such as searching for food, agonistic responses, or escape from predators in animals as different as fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. There are obvious disadvantag...

A two-eye visual environment is used in training a network of BCM neurons. We study the effect of misalignment between the synaptic density functions from the two eyes, on the formation of orientation selectivity and ocular dominance in a lateral inhibition network. The visual environment we use is composed of natural images. We show that for the BCM rule a natural image environment with binocu...