题目：The adaptive brain: Learning to see in altered visual worlds

报告人：Prof. Stephen A. Engel, University of Minnesota

时间：2015年04月07日 星期二 13:00-14:30

地点： 北京大学 王克桢楼（原太平洋大厦）1113室

摘要：Understanding adult neural plasticity is a long-standing goal in neuroscience. In the visual system, neural function alters dramatically as people adapt to changes in their visual world, such as increases or decreases in brightness or clarity. Most past work on visual adaptation, however, has altered visual input only over the short-term, typically a few minutes. I will present a series of experiments that investigate adaptation over a much longer term, from tens of minutes up to 4 days. We use recently developed “altered reality” technology in which subjects view the world through virtual reality goggles that display processed video acquired from a head mounted camera. Image manipulations targeted early visual cortex, and adaptation was measured with perceptual tests. Adaptation grew stronger and longer-lasting as the adapting duration extended from minutes to hours to days. Effects of different adapting durations were behaviorally distinguishable from on another, suggesting that adaptation is controlled by a continuum of neural mechanisms. Classical shorter-term effects of adaptation showed a surprising reversal after about a day. Adapting likely has functional costs that led to this decline, but multi-day adaptation appeared able to overcome these costs. The ability to control adaptation at different timescales may allow vision to perform near optimally in an ever-changing world.