Indian J Ophthalmol
January 2025
Background: Eye care organizations and professionals worldwide are increasingly focusing on bridging the gap between population health and medical practice. Recent advances in genomics and anthropology have revealed that most Indian groups trace their ancestry to a blend of 2 genetically distinct populations: Ancestral North Indians, who share genetic affinities with Central Asians, Middle Easterners, Caucasians, and Europeans; and Ancestral South Indians, genetically distinct from groups outside the Indian subcontinent. Studies conducted among North Indian populations can therefore offer insights that are potentially applicable to these diverse global populations, underscoring significant implications for global health.
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September 2024
In his 1872 monograph, Charles Darwin posited that "… the habit of expressing our feelings by certain movements, though now rendered innate, had been in some manner gradually acquired." Nearly 150 years later, researchers are still teasing apart innate versus experience-dependent contributions to expression recognition. Indeed, studies have shown that face detection is surprisingly resilient to early visual deprivation, pointing to plasticity that extends beyond dogmatic critical periods.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIdentifying faces requires configural processing of visual information. We previously proposed that the poor visual acuity experienced by newborns in their first year of life lays the groundwork for such configural processing by forcing integration over larger spatial fields. This hypothesis predicts that children treated for congenital cataracts late in life will exhibit persistent impairments in face- but not object-identification, because they begin their visual journey with higher than newborn acuity.
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