Disparity configuration influences depth discrimination in naïve adults, but not in children.

We report a series of experiments in which we assess depth discrimination performance in adults and children using a disparity-balanced target configuration to avoid the effects of anticipatory vergence eye movements. In our first study we found that children outperformed adults by a substantial margin, and the adults were consistently near chance. This was surprising given that we initially tested naïve adults to provide a benchmark for the children's data, and all observers met the criterion for stereoacuity. In subsequent experiments we recruited groups of inexperienced adult observers and assessed the role of a wide range of spatial and temporal factors in this apparent deficit. We found that the adult performance remained poor in spite of changes to the stimulus layout, exposure duration, and spatial scale. The only manipulations that improved performance were those that limited the binocular disparity to a single sign. We conclude that these data reflect a form of involuntary disparity pooling that makes it difficult for naïve observers to judge depth from disparity from multiple targets. The absence of this effect in children likely reflects the late maturation of global processes and depth cue integration.

Probabilistic machine learning for the evaluation of presurgical language dominance.

OBJECTIVE Providing a reliable assessment of language lateralization is an important task to be performed prior to neurosurgery in patients with epilepsy. Over the last decade, functional MRI (fMRI) has emerged as a useful noninvasive tool for language lateralization, supplementing or replacing traditional invasive methods. In standard practice, fMRI-based language lateralization is assessed qualitatively by visual inspection of fMRI maps at a specific chosen activation threshold. The purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate a new computational technique for providing the probability of each patient to be left, right, or bilateral dominant in language processing. METHODS In 76 patients with epilepsy, a language lateralization index was calculated using the verb-generation fMRI task over a wide range of activation thresholds (from a permissive threshold, analyzing all brain regions, to a harsh threshold, analyzing only the strongest activations). The data were classified using a probabilistic logistic regression method. RESULTS Concordant results between fMRI and Wada lateralization were observed in 89% of patients. Bilateral and right-dominant groups showed similar fMRI lateralization patterns differentiating them from the left-dominant group but still allowing classification in 82% of patients. CONCLUSIONS These findings present the utility of a semi-supervised probabilistic learning approach for presurgical language-dominance mapping, which may be extended to other cognitive domains such as memory and attention.

On the typical development of stereopsis: fine and coarse processing.

Stereoscopic depth perception may be obtained from small retinal disparities that can be fused for single vision (fine stereopsis), but reliable depth information is also obtained from larger disparities that produce double vision (coarse stereopsis). While there is some evidence that stereoacuity improves with age, little is known about the development and maturation of coarse stereopsis. Here we address this gap by assessing the maturation of stereoscopic depth perception in children (4-14 years) and adults over a large range of disparities from fused (fine) to diplopic (coarse). The observer's task was to indicate whether a stereoscopic cartoon character was nearer or farther away than a zero-disparity reference frame. The test disparities were grouped into fine (0.02, 0.08, 0.17, 0.33, 0.68, 1.0 deg) and coarse (2.0, 2.5, 3.0, 3.5 deg) ranges based on an initial determination of the diplopia threshold for each observer. Next, percent correct depth direction was determined as a function of disparity. In the coarse range, accuracy decreased slightly with disparity and there were no differences as a function of age. In the fine range, accuracy was constant across all disparities in adults and increased with disparity in children of all ages. Performance was immature in all children at the finest disparity tested. We conclude that stereopsis in the coarse range is mature at 4 years of age, but stereopsis in the fine range, at least for small disparities, continues to mature into the school-age years.