Age‐related changes in visual contour integration: Implications for physiology from psychophysics

Hipp, Daniel; Dickerson, Kelly; Moser, Alecia; Gerhardstein, Peter

doi:10.1002/dev.21225

Cited by 13 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…To date, few studies have explored the development of such a closure mechanism across childhood (Gerhardstein et al, 2004; Hadad and Kimchi, 2006; Baker et al, 2008; Hadad et al, 2010a; Hipp et al, 2014). Using a mobile conjugate reinforcement procedure, Gerhardstein et al (2004) found that unlike adults, 3- to 4-month-old infants show no evidence of a closure superiority effect when detecting contours embedded in noise regardless of noise density; manipulation of contour type (open or closed) did not affect sensitivity to the contour at this age.…”

Section: Path To Object Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The development of contour processing: evidence from physiology and psychophysics

et al. 2014

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Object perception and pattern vision depend fundamentally upon the extraction of contours from the visual environment. In adulthood, contour or edge-level processing is supported by the Gestalt heuristics of proximity, collinearity, and closure. Less is known, however, about the developmental trajectory of contour detection and contour integration. Within the physiology of the visual system, long-range horizontal connections in V1 and V2 are the likely candidates for implementing these heuristics. While post-mortem anatomical studies of human infants suggest that horizontal interconnections reach maturity by the second year of life, psychophysical research with infants and children suggests a considerably more protracted development. In the present review, data from infancy to adulthood will be discussed in order to track the development of contour detection and integration. The goal of this review is thus to integrate the development of contour detection and integration with research regarding the development of underlying neural circuitry. We conclude that the ontogeny of this system is best characterized as a developmentally extended period of associative acquisition whereby horizontal connectivity becomes functional over longer and longer distances, thus becoming able to effectively integrate over greater spans of visual space.

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Section: Path To Object Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The development of contour processing: evidence from physiology and psychophysics

et al. 2014

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“…Kovacs (2000) demonstrated, for example, that children's perceptual organization abilities continue to mature during middle childhood. Contour integration specifically appears to develop slowly (Hipp et al, 2014;Hadad, Maurer & Lewis, 2010), which may also point to a more general failure of spatial integration affecting performance in some tasks positively (children are less sensitive than adults to the Ebbinghaus illusion, (Doherty et al, 2010), while proving sub-optimal in other settings (Jeon et al 2010). Considered together, these results suggest that children may have reduced sensitivity to the differences between stimuli that match the statistical properties of natural scenes and those that don't.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Neural Sensitivity to Natural Image Statistics Changes during Middle Childhood

Balas

Saville

2020

Preprint

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Natural images have lawful statistical properties that the adult visual system is sensitive to, both in terms of behavior and neural responses to natural images. The developmental trajectory of sensitivity to natural image statistics remains unclear, however. In behavioral tasks, children appear to slowly acquire adult-like sensitivity to natural image statistics during middle childhood (Ellemberg et al., 2012), but in other tasks, infants exhibit some sensitivity to deviations of natural image structure (Balas & Woods, 2014). Here, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine how sensitivity to natural image statistics changes during childhood at distinct stages of visual processing (the P1 and N1 components). We asked children (5-10 years old) and adults to view natural texture images with either positive/negative contrast, and natural/synthetic texture appearance (Portilla & Simoncelli, 2000) to compare electrophysiological responses to images that did or did not violate natural statistics. We hypothesized that children may only acquire sensitivity to these deviations from natural texture appearance late in middle childhood. Counter to this hypothesis, we observed significant responses to unnatural contrast and texture statistics at the N1 in all age groups. At the P1, however, only young children exhibited sensitivity to contrast polarity.The latter effect suggests greater sensitivity earlier in development to some violations of natural image statistics. We discuss these results in terms of changing patterns of invariant texture processing during middle childhood and ongoing refinement of the representations supporting natural image perception.

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“…Behavioral evidence supporting mechanisms of contour detection suggest that this function is present in the early stages of development (Field et al, 1993;Kovács et al, 1999;Hipp et al, 2014;Taylor et al, 2014), however, full maturation of this function requires years of visual experience. Kovács et al (1999) reported that children younger than 3 years of age were unable to identify a coherent contour defined by a circular ring of gabor patches embedded in noise, and their ability to perform the task improved into their teenage years.…”

Section: Development Of Contour Integration Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Postnatal Development of Visual Cortical Function in the Mammalian Brain

Mohammed

Khalil

2020

Front. Syst. Neurosci.

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This review aims to discuss (1) the refinement of mammalian visual cortical circuits and the maturation of visual functions they subserve in primary visual cortex (V1) and other visual cortical areas, and (2) existing evidence supporting the notion of differential rates of maturation of visual functions in different species. It is well known that different visual functions and their underlying circuitry mature and attain adultlike characteristics at different stages in postnatal development with varying growth rates. The developmental timecourse and duration of refinement varies significantly both in V1 of various species and among different visual cortical areas; while basic visual functions like spatial acuity mature earlier requiring less time, higher form perception such as contour integration is more complex and requires longer postnatal time to refine. This review will highlight the importance of systematic comparative analysis of the differential rates of refinement of visual circuitry and function as that may help reveal underlying key mechanisms necessary for healthy visual development during infancy and adulthood. This type of approach will help future studies to establish direct links between various developmental aspects of different visual cortical areas in both human and animal models; thus enhancing our understanding of vision related neurological disorders and their potential therapeutic remedies.

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Age‐related changes in visual contour integration: Implications for physiology from psychophysics

Cited by 13 publications

References 60 publications

The development of contour processing: evidence from physiology and psychophysics

The development of contour processing: evidence from physiology and psychophysics

Neural Sensitivity to Natural Image Statistics Changes during Middle Childhood

Postnatal Development of Visual Cortical Function in the Mammalian Brain

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