Vision

INDIANAPOLIS -- Using stem cells derived from human skin cells, researchers led by Jason Meyer, assistant professor of biology, along with graduate student Sarah Ohlemacher of the School of Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, have successfully demonstrated the ability to turn stem cells into retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), the neurons that conduct visual information from the eye to the brain. Their goal is the development of therapies to prevent or cure glaucoma. In addition to glaucoma, a group of degenerative diseases that damage the eye's optic nerve and can…

When you look at the rainbow, what you see is the prism like effect of the mist (aerosolized water droplets) in the air reflecting the sunlight from different portions of the spheres.  These water droplets when suspended in air as mist will all reflect different colors at different angles.  The angle between you, the mist and the sun, will then determine which color is being refracted back to you from each location resulting in a rainbow.  This color is itself a special form of radiation, more specifically it is non-ionizing radiation with very specific wavelengths. Your eye is…

Our vision and hearing aren't as reliable as we might think, according to a new study. The scholars conducted the research in part because there had never been a comprehensive study to examine whether humans' 'spatial localization' ability -- that is, whether we can immediately and accurately perceive where an object is located -- is as well-honed as we believe it to be. In the study, subjects were asked to sit facing a black screen, behind which were five loudspeakers. Mounted on the ceiling above was a projector capable of flashing bursts of light onto the screen, at the same spots where…

Scholars have found that the causes of congenital face blindness can be traced back to an early stage in the perceptual process.  Each face is unique and forms a crucial part of a person's identity and interpersonal communication. It is the unique details of our facial features that allow us to recognize one another. However, the situation is different for people with congenital prosopagnosia, or face blindness. People affected by this condition are unable to use facial features to identify the person in front of them. In everyday life, people with facial blindness are often able to…

It isn't obvious that sign language, gestures to replace hearing words, would have regional dialects - accents - but it is so, according to Jami Fisher, a lecturer in the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Linguistics, who is working on a project to document what they're calling the Philadelphia accent of this language. What differentiates one region of American Sign Language from other such dialects? Why do those in the deaf community have an intuition that it's different? And how could scientists understand the regional variation? A sample of the program Jami Fisher and…

When people are listening to music, their emotional reactions to the music are reflected in changes in their pupil size. Researchers from the University of Vienna and the University of Innsbruck, Austria, are the first to show that both the emotional content of the music and the listeners' personal involvement with music influence pupil dilation. A new paper demonstrates that pupil size measurement can be effectively used to probe listeners' reactions to music. The pupil size reflexively adjusts to the amount of ambient light, contracting in bright daylight and dilating at night. However,…

You know our eyelids blink but less know is that so does the human brain, dropping a few frames of visual information here and there. Those lapses of attention come fast -- maybe just once every tenth of a second. But some people may be missing more than others, according to psychologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Intuitively we have this sense that we're viewing the world in a continuous stream, constantly taking in the same amount of information," says Jason Samaha, a University of Wisconsin-Madison doctoral student in psychology. "So if I told people that every 100…

Scientists have discovered that the high pressure in the eye that occurs with most common forms of glaucoma can trigger two genes that work together to cause vision loss, a finding that may help pave the way for new glaucoma drugs. There is currently no way to prevent onset or worsening of glaucoma and it is usually treated by managing fluid pressure inside the eye. The researchers looked at the genes involved in primary open-angle glaucoma, the most common form of the disease, which usually affects people over 50 and can cause blindness. The study, published in the journal Molecular Cell…

Imagine yourself as a graphic designer for New Age musician Enya, tasked with creating her next album cover. Which two or three colors from the grid below do you think would “go best” with her music? Would they be the same ones you’d pick for an album cover or music video for the heavy metal band Metallica? Probably not. Author provided For years, my collaborators and I have been studying music-to-color associations. From our results, it’s clear that emotion plays a crucial role in how we interpret and respond to any number of external stimuli, including colors and songs…

The consistency of the whole appearance rather than the attractiveness of the parts is not just  saying, it's science, according to a study where participants were shown schematic point-light displays that depict a person using 15 moving dots. The representation conveyed both the individual characteristics of a person's movements and their individual body shape.  The team isolated these two areas and separately measured the attractiveness of individual movement styles as well as individual body shapes based on ratings obtained from his research participants. The researchers then…