Dear Users This Friday (starting 1.30 pm in YNiC open plan) there will be a talk by Steve Engel, University of Minnesota, on "Plasticity, and its limits, in the adult visual system: Contrast adaptation from 4 minutes to 4 days" http://www.psych.umn.edu/engellab/ Abstract: Experience with the environment dramatically influences how we act, think, and perceive; understanding the neural plasticity that supports such change is a long-standing goal in cognitive neuroscience. In the visual system, neural function alters dramatically as people adapt to changes in their visual world, such as increases or decreases in brightness or clarity. Most past work on visual adaptation, however, has altered visual input only over the short-term, typically a few minutes. I will present a series of experiments that investigate adaptation over a much longer term. My laboratory recently developed “altered reality” technology that allows subjects to live in, and adapt to, experimentally manipulated visual worlds for hours and days at a time. Subjects viewed the world through virtual reality goggles that display video acquired from a head mounted camera, processed in real time on a laptop computer. In order to characterize long-term visual plasticity, we used image manipulations that targeted early visual cortex, and measured adaptation with perceptual tests. Effects of adaptation grew stronger and longer-lasting as the adapting duration extended from minutes to hours to days. The long term adaptation was behaviourally distinguishable from shorter term adaptation, suggesting that it is controlled by novel neural mechanisms. These controllers may allow vision to perform near optimally in an ever-changing world. Everyone is welcome to attend. N.B. This Friday afternoon talk is a one-off; YNiC seminars will continue on Thursdays from 4.30 pm. Best wishes Rebecca -- ************************************************************************ Dr. Rebecca E. Millman Science Liaison Officer York Neuroimaging Centre The Biocentre York Science Park Heslington YO10 5DG Tel: +44 (0) 1904 567614 Fax: +44 (0) 1904 435356