The mechanics of fading in the visual system

IACONIS, F.; SPECHT, J. I. ; GASANEO, G.

Bahía Blanca

Conferencia; VI Argentinian Conference of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CAB2C); 2015

Asociación Argentina de Bioinformatica y Biologia Computacional

The mechanisms of vision are matter of interest in many branches of science and engineering. The eye, along with the arrange of cells which transform electromagnetic waves into electrochemical signals and the part of the brain associated to the interpretation of image form is one of the most refined systems assembled by nature. The visual system has evolved among different species and in most of them evolution has provided to animal the ability of seeing objects in movement. Apparently, humans share that ability with all the other animals. According with this, and as it happen e.g. in frogs, all images with no motion should fade from our vision [1,2]. However, as can be easily noted, that is not what normally happens, nature has developed a series of movements to prevent fading and allowing for a stable vision. In this communication we will study the way the image is projected over the retina and how the tremor, the drift and the micro-sacadic moments act moving the image over different rodes and cones preventing neural adaptation [2]. We will analyze the projection of the whole visual field on the retina paying particular attention on which part of it is projected over the fovea and which in the external part of it. An analysis of how the color is resolved and how this is done in the most external part of the eye sensors will be analyzed using a Fourier type representation. [1] Coppola D and Purves D: The extraordinarily rapid disappearance of entoptic images. Proc Natl Acad Sci 1996, 93:8001-8004.[2] Martinez-Conde S, Otero-Millan J and Macknik SL: The impact of microsaccades on vision: towards a unified theory of saccadic function. Nature Reviews 2013, 14:82-96.