Visual Plasticity of the Adult Brain

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139136907.009

9 - Visual Plasticity of the Adult Brain

from III - PLASTICITY IN ADULTHOOD AND VISION REHABILITATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013

Robert F. Hess and

Benjamin Thompson

Edited by

Jennifer K. E. Steeves and

Laurence R. Harris

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Robert F. Hess: Affiliation:
McGill University
Benjamin Thompson: Affiliation:
McGill University
Jennifer K. E. Steeves: Affiliation:
York University, Toronto
Laurence R. Harris: Affiliation:
York University, Toronto

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Summary

Historical Preamble

When I arrived in Cambridge in the late 1970s to work with the late Fergus Campbell, the notion of critical periods for visual development was already well established through the seminal works of Hubel and Wiesel (1967), Blakemore (1976), and others (see Daw, 1995). The clinical implication of this was also recognized, namely, that visual improvements from the patching treatment of amblyopia were likely to be strongly age dependent and ineffective after the age of 7 to 8 years. At that time, the wisdom of Sir Stewart Duke-Elder held sway: “for patching to work it needs to be total and complete, day and night.” Fergus always felt that the stronger the statement, the more likely it was to be wrong. In fact, at that time, I remember his method for choosing research projects for graduate students. He would go to his bookshelf and choose at random one of Duke-Elder's System of Ophthalmology volumes, open it at random and locate a definitive statement on some visual topic. “Let's show this is wrong,” he would say, and the die was cast for what usually turned out to be another fruitful piece of research.

Fergus felt that some form of active stimulation would be better than the passive viewing that resulted from patching. He was enamored with the idea of the visual cortex as a spatial frequency analyzer, and because my early results suggested amblyopes suffered from severe spatial distortions (Hess et al., 1978), his first suggestion for a new therapy was to show a single spatial frequency at sequential orientations to help their visual cortex “sort out” what we hypothesized were anomalous interactions between these spatial analysers.

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Type: Chapter
Information: Plasticity in Sensory Systems , pp. 155 - 174

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139136907.009 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2012

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