FBS Colloquia No.229Visual Neuroscience Laboratory

Neurons in primary visual cortex are "deceived" by visual illusion

Vision is a dynamic sense; animals adapts to a recent visual environment so that they can make the best use of information available in it. Here we report neurons in primary visual cortex exhibit extraordinarily fast adaptation to the temporal average of local luminance. This appears to underlie fading illusion where dim percepts in periphery fade away gradually and disappear eventually if retinal images are still for seconds during fixation.