Daniel Butts, Ph.D.
Professor, Dept of Biology
The University of Maryland

Cortical processing of high acuity vision

When we want to see something, we look at it. Our highest acuity vision is present in the central one degree of our visual field (the fovea), and eye movements direct the fovea to regions of interest in the visual scene. Despite its importance for vision, neural processing of foveal vision is essentially unstudied. I will show that fovea representations are distinct, and shaped by the constraints implicit in extracting spatial and chromatic information at the highest resolutions. These measurements not only fix the upper limits of spatial and color vision, but are also critical in shaping visual behavior.

Faculty Host: Chris Fetsch