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The information available through our senses is noisy, incomplete, and to varying degrees ambiguous. The perceptual system must create stable and reliable percepts out of this restricted information. It solves this perceptual inference problem by integrating memories of previous percepts and making predictions about the perceptual future. Using ambiguous figures and a new experimental approach, we studied whether generating predictions based on regularities in the past affects processing of the present and how this is done. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured to investigate whether a highly regular temporal context of either ambiguous or unambiguous stimulus variants differently affects processing of a current stimulus and/or task execution. Further, we tested whether symbolic announcements about the immediate perceptual future can replace the past experience of regularities as a source for making predictions. Both ERP and reaction time varied as a function of stimulus ambiguity in the temporal context of a present stimulus. No such effects were found with symbolic announcements. Our results indicate that predictions about the future automatically alter processing of the present, even if the predictions are irrelevant for the present percept and task. However, direct experiences of past regularities are necessary for predicting the future whereas symbolic information about the future is not sufficient., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

The information available through our senses is noisy, incomplete, and ambiguous. Our perceptual systems have to resolve this ambiguity to construct stable and reliable percepts. Previous EEG studies found large amplitude differences in two event-related potential (ERP) components 200 and 400 ms after stimulus onset when comparing ambiguous with disambiguated visual information ("ERP Ambiguity Effects"). These effects so far generalized across classical ambiguous figures from different visual categories at lower (geometry, motion) and intermediate (Gestalt perception) levels. The present study aimed to examine whether these ERP Effects are restricted to ambiguous figures or whether they also occur for different degrees of visibility. Smiley faces with low and high visibility of emotional expressions, as well as abstract figures with low and high visibility of a target curvature were presented. We thus compared ambiguity effects in geometric cube stimuli with visibility in emotional faces, and with visibility in abstract figures. ERP Effects were replicated for the geometric stimuli and very similar ERP Effects were found for stimuli with emotional face expressions but also for abstract figures. Conclusively, the ERP amplitude effects generalize across fundamentally different stimulus categories and show highly similar effects for different degrees of stimulus ambiguity and stimulus visibility. We postulate the existence of a high-level/meta-perceptual evaluation instance, beyond sensory details, that estimates the certainty of a perceptual decision. The ERP Effects may reflect differences in evaluation results., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Objective: To assess visual acuity objectively "beyond V1", the P300 event-related potential is a promising candidate and closely associated with conscious perception. However, the P300 can be willfully modulated, a disadvantage for objective visual acuity estimation. Faces are very salient stimuli and difficult to ignore. Here, we present a P300-type paradigm to assess visual acuity with faces., Methods: Gray-scale portraits of the respective subject served as oddball stimuli (probability 1/7), scrambled versions of these as the standard stimuli (probability 6/7). Furthermore, stimuli were spatially high-pass filtered (at 0, 2.2, 4.2 and 8.3 cpd), making them recognizable only with sufficient acuity. Acuity was systematically reduced by dioptric blur, chosen individually to render faces unrecognizable when high-passed at ≥ 4.2 cpd. EEG was recorded from 11 subjects at 32 scalp positions and re-referenced to the average of TP9 and TP10. One of the rare face variants was designated as target, for which a button had to be pressed., Results: The event-related potential was dominated by the P300 at 300-800 ms. All subjects had a significant (P < 0.05) P300 for 0- to 8.3-cpd filtering. When vision was blurred, the fraction of significant P300 responses to 8.3-cpd filtered faces dropped to 18%, but stayed at 100% for 4.2 cpd. Another component, the vertex positive potential (VPP) at 170 ms, was undetectable in most participants with blur and all levels of filtering, even when the images were recognizable., Conclusions: The study demonstrates the feasibility of a face-based P300 approach to objectively assess visual acuity. The sensitivity to stimulus degradation was comparable to that of a grating-based approach as previously reported. An unexpected finding was the differing behavior of the P300 and the VPP. The VPP was quite sensitive to high-pass filtering, while the P300 sustained stronger filtering, although for its generation, the faces must also be discriminated from scrambled faces.

Purpose: Reading a text requires vergence angle adjustments, so that the images in the two eyes fall on corresponding retinal areas. Vergence adjustments bring the two retinal images into Panum's fusional area and therefore, small remaining errors or regulations do not lead to double vision. The present study evaluated dynamic and static aspects of the binocular coordination when upcoming text was blurred., Methods: Binocular eye movements and accommodation responses were simultaneously measured for 20 participants while reading single, nonblurred sentences and while the text was blurred as if it were seen by a person in whom the combination of refraction and accommodation deviated from the stimulus plane by 0.5 D., Results: Text comprehension did not change, even though fixation times increased for reading blurred sentences. The disconjugacy during saccades was also not affected by blurred text presentations, but the vergence adjustment during fixations was reduced. Further, for blurred text, the overall vergence angle shifted in the exo direction, and this shift correlated with the individual heterophoria. Accommodation measures showed that the lag of accommodation was slightly larger for reading blurred sentences and that the shift in vergence angle was larger when the individual lag of accommodation was also larger., Conclusions: The results suggest that reading comprehension is robust against changes in binocular coordination that result from moderate text degradation; nevertheless, these changes are likely to be linked to the development of fatigue and visual strain in near reading conditions.

Background: Practice-related improvements of performance are common in many areas of visual processing. There is preliminary evidence that this is also the case for standard optotype acuity tasks. The present study was designed to confirm and quantify the effect of practice under different feedback conditions and to track the dynamics of practice over several sessions., Methods: Subjects completed a total of 56 runs of a computer-based acuity test with randomly oriented Landolt C optotypes, split evenly over four sessions at intervals of 1 week. Half of the subjects received feedback indicating the correct response., Results: Over the course of the sessions, the test outcomes increased significantly by 0.11 logMAR with feedback and by 0.055 logMAR without feedback. In addition to an increase in acuity over the first few runs of the first session, a major part of the practice effect with feedback occurred not during a session, but in between the first and the second session. Without feedback, the increase in acuity occurred mainly within the first half of the first session., Conclusions: Feedback has a drastic effect on the magnitude and dynamics of the practice effect, which is not explained by simple familiarization with the test procedure. If feedback is not given, practice effects can be neglected in most clinical routine applications even when many test repetitions are performed. However, they may become relevant on a group level in clinical studies without an appropriate control.

Visual texture segregation is believed to be performed preattentively. Recent evidence, however, suggests that attention does play an important role. Using visual evoked potentials (VEPs), we investigated the effect of different tasks on texture segregation. Stimuli consisted of Gabor-filtered binary noise patterns. In segregated stimuli, local texture orientation contrasts defined global checkerboard patterns. VEP responses specific to texture segregation were obtained by computing the difference between VEPs to homogeneous and segregated stimuli. Four conditions were examined that required attending either the global pattern, the local structure, random numbers displayed on the screen, or a series of tones. Responses specific to texture segregation were dominated by two occipital negativities peaking around 110 and 230 ms. The earlier one was not affected by the task, whereas the later one was completely abolished when the subjects attended to either numbers or tones (p = .0005 and p = .006, respectively). The results suggest that early stages of texture segregation are not affected by attention, whereas task relevance is crucial for later processes. The timing is compatible with a recurrent processing pattern with initial bottom-up processing of basic stimulus characteristics and a subsequent top-down flow of higher level modulatory information. As attention effects occur across modalities, they cannot be simply explained by competition within the visual cortex.

Previous pattern electroretinogram studies indicate reduced retinal contrast gain in patients with a major depressive disorder (MDD) which may contribute to alterations in visual perception. In line, psychophysical investigations reported elevated contrast thresholds in MDD. This study aims to gain insights into higher-level processing of visual information in MDD by evaluating contrast suppression. We examined contrast suppression of 21 MDD patients and 23 healthy controls (HC) using four different stimulus conditions (spatial frequencies 6.3 and 12.6 cpd at 30% and 60% background contrast) in a psychophysical test. Participants were instructed to adjust perceived contrasts between two vertical target patches, embedded in a horizontally or vertically oriented grid background. With finer stimulus gratings, MDD patients exhibited less contrast suppression compared to HC, particularly when the stimulus contrast was high (p = 0.006; MDD vs. HC = − 45%). Contrast suppression in the HC group was significantly reduced for the coarse compared to the fine grating, while contrast suppression scores in MDD did not change with the spatial properties of the stimulus. The reduced contrast suppression in patients with MDD supports the hypothesis of altered dopaminergic neurotransmission and could be attributed to alterations in the retinal receptive fields or in dysfunctional adaptation mechanisms in depression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: International standards define acuity as the reciprocal of the threshold gap size of a Landolt C optotype. However, the literature is inconsistent as to what type of acuity is measured with Landolt Cs. The present study addresses this question more directly than previous studies by quantifying the effect of an inherent luminance artifact in Landolt-style optotypes. Methods: Two groups of modified optotypes were used. In the first group, each optotype had a single gap structure with the same average luminance. Between optotypes, the gap structures differed in their degree of fineness. In the second group of optotypes, a standard gap was always present, defining the orientation of the optotype. Additional gap structures of the same average luminance, but different fineness, were inserted at the remaining potential gap locations, thereby balancing luminance across potential gap locations. Visual acuity measures were obtained for each optotype variant, using a computer-based test employing a staircase procedure. Results: Similar acuity values were obtained for all optotypes of the first group, and for standard Landolt Cs, irrespective of the fineness of the gap structure. With luminance-balanced optotypes of the second group, measured acuity was halved, compared to standard optotypes. Conclusions: The results support the view that it is recognition acuity, rather than resolution acuity, which is measured with standard Landolt-style optotypes, with the imbalanced luminance distribution serving as a cue. Luminance-balanced optotypes may help to obtain a more veridical estimate of resolution acuity, although recognition acuity may be more relevant in daily living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A high reproducibility of visual acuity estimates is important when monitoring disease progression or treatment success. One factor that may affect the result of an acuity measurement is the duration of optotype presentation. For times below 1 s, previous studies have convincingly shown that acuity estimates increase with presentation duration. For durations above 1 s, the situation is less clear. We have reassessed this issue using the Freiburg Visual Acuity Test with normal subjects. Presentation durations of 0.1 s, 1 s, and 10 s were assessed. Confirming previous findings, in all subjects acuity estimates in the 1-s condition were higher than those in the 0.1-s condition, on average nearly by a factor of 2, equivalent to 3 lines. However, in 12 out of 14 subjects, acuity estimates increased further with a presentation duration of 10 s, on average by 23% ( P = 0.002), or roughly 1 line. Test–retest variability improved by 49% ( P = 0.003). These findings can be explained by a simple statistical model of acuity fluctuations. Cognitive processing may also be a relevant factor. Interestingly, most observers subjectively felt that they could perceive the optotypes best in the 1-s condition. The results highlight the importance of standardizing presentation durations when high reproducibility is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Event-related potential responses to oddball stimuli, including the P300 component, have been proposed as a diagnostic tool for discerning psychiatric or higher-level neural disorders from malingering, for instance in cases of unexplained visual loss. For clinical use, short recording durations and easy statistical assessment are highly desirable. With this aim, we investigated the feasibility of recording oddball responses in a fast steady-state regime. We used gratings with two possible orientations in a rapid oddball paradigm with an inter-stimulus interval of 214 ms. Six consecutive presentations of one stimulus type (frequent) were followed by a single presentation of the other (infrequent) stimulus type. Subjects were attending to the rare stimulus type. The electroencephalographic recordings were analyzed in the frequency domain. All subjects produced significant harmonic responses related to the processing of the rare stimulus, demonstrating the feasibility of the technique, with the potential of reducing recording times substantially compared to conventional slow stimulation. We furthermore found that the regularity of the occurrence of infrequent stimuli, which is necessary for frequency-domain analysis, does not per se reduce the P300 responses, as would have been expected in the framework of some hypotheses regarding the role of the P300. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Motion processing is strongly adaptable. Adaptation strength generally increases with motion duration. Little is known, though, about the effect of motion onsets and offsets, which might be relevant if adaptation is not based on motion duration per se, but on the recent cumulated activity of motion-processing mechanisms. Thus, we presented intermittent motion with three different onset rates for adaptation. The duty cycle was kept constant at 33% while the rate of motion onsets was either 1.4, 2.8, or 5.6 per second. Stationary stimuli and continuous motion were used as reference conditions. The amplitude of the N2 component of human motion visual evoked potentials was used to quantify adaptation. All three onset rates induced virtually identical amounts of adaptation (occipitally, P=0.71; occipito-temporally, P=0.27), suggesting that the continuousness of the stimulus does not play an important role in motion adaptation. This was confirmed by measuring the motion aftereffect psychophysically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Visual motion processing is strongly susceptible to adaptation. A variety of patterns have been used as stimuli in previous studies. Three of these, namely random dots, barcode-like gratings, and sinusoidal gratings, were compared in the present study using motion-onset visual evoked potentials (VEPs). We assessed the effects of the adaptation pattern and the test pattern to which the VEP is recorded. Furthermore, we evaluated the interaction between both, i.e. whether differences between adaptation and test pattern affect the response. Isodirectional and antidirectional adaptation were used to differentiate between the actual motion adaptation and associated flicker adaptation. Motion adaptation was almost 2.5-fold stronger (p &#60;0.01) if the same rather than different pattern types were used for both adaptation and test. This implies that separate neural populations are involved, suggesting the presence of pattern-tuned motion mechanisms. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]