Meisen Wang Rose Hills
Perceptive Filling-in of Speed on Physiological Blind Spot
The physiological blind spot is a region in the visual field that corresponds to the location of the optic nerve of an eye. The optic nerve is a bundle of nerve fibers that connect the eye and the brain. Because there are no photoreceptors (light sensors) in the optic nerve, this region is “blind” in that the brain receives no visual input from this location. However, as we do not see a black spot in the periphery of our vision even with only one eye, the lack of informational input at the blind spot is evidently “filled in” by the brain using information from neighboring regions.
Previous studies using psychophysics and neural imaging techniques suggested an interpolation mechanism taking place in the primary visual cortex (V1). In the proposed study, we will investigate the filling-in at higher cortical levels by examining if the speed of visual elements, which is thought to be mainly encoded in the middle temporal cortex (MT), can be interpolated in the blind spot similarly.