Gaze following requires early visual experience.

Gaze understanding—a suggested precursor for understanding others’ intentions—requires recovery of gaze direction from the observed person's head and eye position. This challenging computation is naturally acquired at infancy without explicit external guidance, but can it be learned later if vision is extremely poor throughout early childhood? We addressed this question by studying gaze following in Ethiopian patients with early bilateral congenital cataracts diagnosed and treated by us only at late childhood. This sight restoration provided a unique opportunity to directly address basic issues on the roles of “nature” and “nurture” in development, as it caused a selective perturbation to the natural process, eliminating some gaze-direction cues while leaving others still available.

Development of multisensory integration following prolonged early-onset visual deprivation.

Adult humans make effortless use of multisensory signals and typically integrate them in an optimal fashion. This remarkable ability takes many years for normally sighted children to develop. Would individuals born blind or with extremely low vision still be able to develop multisensory integration later in life when surgically treated for sight restoration? Late acquisition of such capability would be a vivid example of the brain's ability to retain high levels of plasticity.

Learning to perceive shape from temporal integration following late emergence from blindness.

Visual perception requires massive use of inference because the 3D structure of the world is not directly provided by the sensory input. Particularly challenging is anorthoscopic vision-when an object moves behind a narrow slit such that only a tiny fraction of it is visible at any instant. Impressively, human observers correctly recognize objects in slit-viewing conditions by early childhood, via temporal integration of the contours available in each sliver.

The presence of semantic content in a visual recognition memory task reduces the severity of neglect.

Patients with right hemisphere damage often show a lateral bias when asked to report the left side of mental images held in visual working memory (i.e. representational neglect).

On the superiority of visual processing in spatiotopic coordinates.

Organisms exploit spatiotemporal regularities in the environment to optimize goal attainment. For example, in experimental conditions, repetition of a stimulus at the same position speeds up response time. A recent study reported that this spatial priming occurs even when the eyes move between trials, indicating that the target is encoded in spatiotopic coordinates (Attention, Perception & Psychophysics 78, (2016) 114-132).

Lack of Automatic Imitation in Newly Sighted Individuals.

Viewing a hand action performed by another person facilitates a response-compatible action and slows a response-incompatible one, even when the viewed action is irrelevant to the task. This automatic imitation effect is taken as the clearest evidence for a direct mapping between action viewing and motor performance. But there is an ongoing debate whether this effect is innate or experience dependent.

Object Representations in Human Visual Cortex Formed Through Temporal Integration of Dynamic Partial Shape Views.

We typically recognize visual objects using the spatial layout of their parts, which are present simultaneously on the retina. Therefore, shape extraction is based on integration of the relevant retinal information over space. The lateral occipital complex (LOC) can represent shape faithfully in such conditions.

Size constancy following long-term visual deprivation.

We can estimate the veridical size of nearby objects reasonably well irrespective of their viewing distance. This perceptual capability, termed size constancy, is accomplished by combining information about retinal image size together with the viewing distance, or using the relational information available in the scene, via direct perception [1]. A previous study [2] showed that children typically underestimate the size of a distant object.

Practice improves peri-saccadic shape judgment but does not diminish target mislocalization.

Visual sensitivity is markedly reduced during an eye movement. Peri-saccadic vision is also characterized by a mislocalization of the briefly presented stimulus closer to the saccadic target. These features are commonly viewed as obligatory elements of peri-saccadic vision.

Turning Symbolic: The Representation of Motion Direction in Working Memory.

What happens to the representation of a moving stimulus when it is no longer present and its motion direction has to be maintained in working memory (WM)? Is the initial, sensorial representation maintained during the delay period or is there another representation, at a higher level of abstraction? It is also feasible that multiple representations may co-exist in WM, manifesting different facets of sensory and more abstract features. To that end, we investigated the mnemonic representation of motion direction in a series of three psychophysical experiments, using a delayed motion-discrimination task (relative clockwise∖counter-clockwise judgment). First, we show that a change in the dots' contrast polarity does not hamper performance.

The Limits of Shape Recognition following Late Emergence from Blindness.

Visual object recognition develops during the first years of life. But what if one is deprived of vision during early post-natal development? Shape information is extracted using both low-level cues (e.g.

Position and Identity Information Available in fMRI Patterns of Activity in Human Visual Cortex.

Unlabelled: Parietal cortex is often implicated in visual processing of actions. Action understanding is essentially abstract, specific to the type or goal of action, but greatly independent of variations in the perceived position of the action. If certain parietal regions are involved in action understanding, then we expect them to show these generalization and selectivity properties.

Hands in motion: an upper-limb-selective area in the occipitotemporal cortex shows sensitivity to viewed hand kinematics.

Regions in the occipitotemporal cortex (OTC) show clear selectivity to static images of human body parts, and upper limbs in particular, with respect to other object categories. Such selectivity was previously attributed to shape aspects, which presumably vary across categories. Alternatively, it has been proposed that functional selectivity for upper limbs is driven by processing of their distinctive motion features.

Fingerprints of Learned Object Recognition Seen in the fMRI Activation Patterns of Lateral Occipital Complex.

One feature of visual processing in the ventral stream is that cortical responses gradually depart from the physical aspects of the visual stimulus and become correlated with perceptual experience. Thus, unlike early retinotopic areas, the responses in the object-related lateral occipital complex (LOC) are typically immune to parameter changes (e.g.

Visual memory in unilateral spatial neglect: immediate recall versus delayed recognition.

Patients with unilateral spatial neglect (USN) often show impaired performance in spatial working memory tasks, apart from the difficulty retrieving "left-sided" spatial data from long-term memory, shown in the "piazza effect" by Bisiach and colleagues. This study's aim was to compare the effect of the spatial position of a visual object on immediate and delayed memory performance in USN patients. Specifically, immediate verbal recall performance, tested using a simultaneous presentation of four visual objects in four quadrants, was compared with memory in a later-provided recognition task, in which objects were individually shown at the screen center.

Motion adaptation reveals that the motion vector is represented in multiple coordinate frames.

Accurately perceiving the velocity of an object during smooth pursuit is a complex challenge: although the object is moving in the world, it is almost still on the retina. Yet we can perceive the veridical motion of a visual stimulus in such conditions, suggesting a nonretinal representation of the motion vector. To explore this issue, we studied the frames of representation of the motion vector by evoking the well known motion aftereffect during smooth-pursuit eye movements (SPEM).

Viewed actions are mapped in retinotopic coordinates in the human visual pathways.

Viewed object-oriented actions elicit widespread fMRI activation in the dorsal and ventral visual pathways. This activation is typically stronger in the hemisphere contralateral to the visual field in which action is seen. However, since in previous studies participants kept fixation at the same screen position throughout the scan, it was impossible to infer if the viewed actions are represented in retina-based coordinates or in a more elaborated coordinate system.

The representation of visual and motor aspects of reaching movements in the human motor cortex.

The human primary motor cortex (M1) is robustly activated during visually guided hand movements. M1 multivoxel patterns of functional MRI activation are more correlated during repeated hand movements to the same targets than to greatly differing ones, and therefore potentially contain information about movement direction. It is unclear, however, whether direction specificity is due to the motor command, as implicitly assumed, or to the visual aspects of the task, such as the target location and the direction of the cursor's trajectory.

Multiple reference frames for saccadic planning in the human parietal cortex.

We apply functional magnetic resonance imaging and multivariate analysis methods to study the coordinate frame in which saccades are represented in the human cortex. Subjects performed a memory-guided saccade task in which equal-amplitude eye movements were executed from several starting points to various directions. Response patterns during the memory period for same-vector saccades were correlated in the frontal eye fields and the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), indicating a retinotopic representation.

Topographic representation of the human body in the occipitotemporal cortex.

Large-scale topographic representations of the body have long been established in the somatosensory and motor cortices. Using functional imaging, we identified a topographically organized body part map within the occipitotemporal cortex (OTC), with distinct clusters of voxels showing clear preference for different visually presented body parts. This representation was consistent both across hemispheres and participants.

Functional organization of human motor cortex: directional selectivity for movement.

In monkeys, neurons in the hand representation of the primary motor cortex (M1) are often tuned to the direction of hand movement, and there is evidence that these neurons are clustered according to their "preferred" direction of movement. However, this organizational principle has yet to be demonstrated in M1 of humans. We conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study in which participants used a joystick to move a cursor from a central origin to one of five equidistant targets.

Rapid formation of spatiotopic representations as revealed by inhibition of return.

Inhibition of return (IOR), a performance decrement for stimuli appearing at recently cued locations, occurs when the target and cue share the same screen position. This is in contrast to cue-based attention facilitation effects that were recently suggested to be mapped in a retinotopic reference frame, the prevailing representation throughout early visual processing stages. Here, we investigate the dynamics of IOR in both reference frames, using a modified cued-location saccadic reaction time task with an intervening saccade between cue and target presentation.

Cortical activity during tactile exploration of objects in blind and sighted humans.

Purpose: Recent studies show evidence of multisensory representation in the functionally normal visual cortex, but this idea remains controversial. Occipital cortex activation is often claimed to be a reflection of mental visual imagery processes triggered by other modalities. However, if the occipital cortex is genuinely active during touch, this might be the basis for the massive cross-modal plasticity observed in the congenitally blind.

Pattern matching is assessed in retinotopic coordinates.

We typically examine scenes by performing multiple saccades to different objects of interest within the image. Therefore, an extra-retinotopic representation, invariant to the changes in the retinal image caused by eye movements, might be useful for high-level visual processing. We investigate here, using a matching task, whether the representation of complex natural images is retinotopic or screen-based.