Research
Theme 1: Vision for Living: Eye and Brain
Theme Leader: T.D. Lamb
The ability of our visual system to operate over an enormous range of intensities, from starlight to sunlight, arises from the properties of the rod and cone photoreceptors in the retina. And our ability to perceive the world as spatially organised, detailed, colourful, and full of movement, is mediated by the visual regions of the brain, which process the output from the retina. This theme probes fundamental mechanisms of vision at a series of levels, from the photoreceptors, through the retina, to the brain, in order to provide detailed information about the mechanisms underlying vision. The research in this theme is designed to interdigitate with that in Themes 2 and 3, to provide a scientific basis for understanding the health of the photoreceptors, as well as the utility of the information processing strategies adopted by our brain. Work in this theme is being undertaken in two Research Schools of the ANU, in the Universities of Queensland, Sydney, and Pennsylvania, the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute (San Francisco), Kokushikan University (Tokyo), and Helsinki University of Technology.
The specific projects in this theme are:
Dark adaptation, of human retinal cells measured from the ERG
Human psychophysical dark adaptation
Mammalian rod photoreceptor shut-off kinetics
Amphibian rod responses from single-photon to intense flash regime
Multi-electrode recording of topographic organization of direction selectivity
Brain regulation of retinal function in the bird retina
Applications of multifocal methods to vision in disease and health
Multimodal-multifocal analysis of the hierarchy of human visual cortical areas
Organization and reorganisation of visual cortex
