Publications by authors named "R S Farivar"

Traditional neuroimaging methods have identified alterations in brain activity patterns following mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), particularly during rest, complex tasks, and normal vision. However, studies using graph theory to examine brain network changes in mTBI have produced varied results, influenced by the specific networks and task demands analyzed. In our study, we employed functional MRI to observe 17 mTBI patients and 54 healthy individuals as they viewed a simple, non-narrative underwater film, simulating everyday visual tasks.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Visual disturbances are amongst the most commonly reported symptoms after a traumatic brain injury (TBI) despite vision testing being uncommon at initial clinical evaluation. TBI patients consistently present a wide range of visual complaints, including photophobia, double vision, blurred vision, and loss of vision which can detrimentally affect reading abilities, postural balance, and mobility. In most cases, especially in rural areas, visual disturbances of TBI would have to be diagnosed and assessed by primary care physicians, who lack the specialized training of optometry.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: Amblyopia is diagnosed as a reduced acuity in an otherwise healthy eye, which indicates that the deficit is not happening in the eye, but in the brain. One suspected mechanism explaining these deficits is an elevated amount of intrinsic blur in the amblyopic visual system compared to healthy observers. This "internally produced blur" can be estimated by the "equivalent intrinsic blur method", which measures blur discrimination thresholds while systematically increasing the external blur in the physical stimulus.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A fundamental step to predicting brain activity in healthy and diseased populations is characterizing the common spatio-temporal response to a shared experience. Multivoxel pattern analysis allows us to investigate information encoding through these patterns; however, we have yet to explore local, stimulus-driven, patterns of cortical activity during naturalistic stimulation. We sought to examine these patterns with minimum interpolation-excluding functional alignment-to characterize the most basic degree of shared response between subjects.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Prototypical brain responses describe similarity in neural representations between subjects in response to a natural stimulus. During natural movie viewing, for example, inter-subject correlation (ISC) measured by fMRI is high in visual areas (Hasson et al., 2004).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF