Vision - Vocabulary Noba Flashcards
What is binocular advantage?
Benefits from having two eyes as opposed to a single eye.
What are cones?
Photoreceptors that operate in lighted environments and can encode fine visual details. There are three different kinds (S or blue, M or green, and L or red) that are each sensitive to slightly different types of light. Combined, these three types of cones allow you to have color vision.
What is contrast?
Relative difference in the amount and type of light coming from two nearby locations.
What is contrast gain?
Process where the sensitivity of your visual system can be tuned to be most sensitive to the levels of contrast that are most prevalent in the environment.
What is dark adaptation?
Process that allows you to become sensitive to very small levels of light, so that you can actually see in the near-absence of light.
What is lateral inhibition?
A signal produced by a neuron aimed at suppressing the response of nearby neurons.
What is the opponent process theory?
Theory of color vision that assumes there are four different basic colors, organized into two pairs (red/green and blue/yellow) and proposes that colors in the world are encoded in terms of the opponency (or difference) between the colors in each pair. There is an additional black/white pair responsible for coding light contrast.
What is photoactivation?
A photochemical reaction that occurs when light hits photoreceptors, producing a neural signal.
What is the primary visual cortex (V1)?
Brain region located in the occipital cortex (toward the back of the head) responsible for processing basic visual information like the detection, thickness, and orientation of simple lines, color, and small-scale motion.
What are rods?
Photoreceptors that are very sensitive to light and are mostly responsible for night vision.
What is synesthesia?
The blending of two or more sensory experiences, or the automatic activation of a secondary (indirect) sensory experience due to certain aspects of the primary (direct) sensory stimulation.
What is trichromacy theory?
Theory that proposes that all of your color perception is fundamentally based on the combination of three (not two, not four) different color signals.
What is the vestibulo-ocular reflex?
Coordination of motion information with visual information that allows you to maintain your gaze on an object while you move.
What is the ‘what’ pathway?
Pathway of neural processing in the brain that is responsible for your ability to recognize what is around you.
What is the ‘where-and-how’ pathway?
Pathway of neural processing in the brain that is responsible for you knowing where things are in the world and how to interact with them.
