December 2022
Volume 22, Issue 14
Open Access
Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting Abstract  |   December 2022
Visual motion perception before and after sight recovery from early-onset and prolonged near-blindness
Author Affiliations & Notes
  • Tanya Orlov
    The Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences , Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  • Ehud Zohary
    The Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences , Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  • Footnotes
    Acknowledgements  Supported by the DFG German-Israeli Project Cooperation grant #Z0 349/1
Journal of Vision December 2022, Vol.22, 3941. doi:https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.22.14.3941
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      Tanya Orlov, Ehud Zohary; Visual motion perception before and after sight recovery from early-onset and prolonged near-blindness. Journal of Vision 2022;22(14):3941. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.22.14.3941.

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      © ARVO (1962-2015); The Authors (2016-present)

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Abstract

Motion cues are central for visual perception and action, and are utilized extremely early in development, (e.g. infants recognize biological motion within 1-2 days from birth, and are sensitive to the direction of global motion within 2 months). In general, the dorsal (motion) pathway develops faster than the ventral (form) pathway. But is this still the case if one was practically blind during the first years of life? We studied 16 Ethiopian children (age 8-18) who had bilateral dense cataracts from birth, resulting in extremely poor visual acuity. They were diagnosed and surgically-treated only years later. We hypothesized that global motion perception might be preserved in some cases even before surgery, because it may be extractable from information in very low spatial frequencies, which are still visible to the patients. To that end, we tested 8 children before surgery (pre-ops), and 8 others after surgery (post-ops). The first task required judging the global direction of dots moving in various directions (distributed symmetrically around the mean direction). Two pre-ops with extremely low visual acuity (< 0.1 cpd) failed in this task. All other patients (14 total; 6 pre-ops) including those with poor visual acuity (0.16 – 0.75 cpd), showed above-chance performance. The second task required fine direction discrimination of fully coherent motion. Interestingly, unlike the first task, the patients' direction sensitivity score was positively correlated with their visual acuity. Presumably, information from higher spatial frequencies allowed for finer discrimination of motion direction, but was not necessary for mean (coarse) direction assessment based on heterogeneous motion signal pooling. Our data indicates that global motion perception can develop in early childhood despite the absence of patterned vision. Thus, the visual-motion pathway remains functional even when acuity is extremely poor, and perhaps, serves as an important tool for form vision acquisition after cataract-removal surgery.

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