April 2020

Zoom Brown Bag: Normal and Disrupted Binocular Interactions in Human Striate and Extra-striate Visual Cortex

Abstract - I will describe recent studies in the lab on binocular interactions in striate and extra-striate visual cortex in normal and amblyopic vision. Using source-imaged SSVEP and frequency-domain analysis of dichoptic stimuli, we measured two forms of binocular interactions: one is associated with the individual stimuli that represent interocular suppression from each eye, and the other is a direct measure of interocular interaction between inputs from the two eyes. We have shown that both forms of binocular interactions share a common gain control mechanism in striate and extra-striate cortex. Furthermore, our model fits, revealed different patterns of binocular interaction along the visual cortical hierarchy, particularly in terms of excitatory and suppressive contributions in normal and amblyopic vision. https://www.ski.org/users/chuan-hou