Honors Theses and Capstones

Date of Award

Spring 2016

Project Type

Senior Honors Thesis

College or School

COLSA

Department

Biological Sciences; Psychology

Program or Major

Biology

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science

First Advisor

William Stine

Abstract

Motion-Induced Blindness (MIB) is the perceived, spontaneous disappearance of a salient target when it is viewed in the presence of a moving mask, and is believed to be controlled by extrastriate area 5 (Donner et al., 2008). The ON and OFF pathways in the human visual system are responsible for the detection of increments and decrements of light, respectively. The OFF pathway is more sensitive to decrements than the ON pathway is to increments before the middle layers of V1. However, after this point, the sensitivities are comparable in strength. Past experiments in this lab have shown that the ON and OFF pathways retain some differences past V1. The purpose of this study was to further examine the asymmetries between the ON and OFF cell pathways by measuring the perceived MIB under different increment/decrement conditions. This was done by varying the luminance of the mask and target between increments and decrements, with 6 different possible combinations, and measuring the perceived disappearance of the target. Results have shown that decrement targets are harder to mask than increment targets.

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