Rare cases of restored vision reveal how the brain learns to see
Thursday, September 17, 2009 - 14:47
in Psychology & Sociology
Results: By testing formerly blind patients within weeks of sight restoration, Sinha and his colleagues found that subjects had very limited ability to distinguish an object from its background, identify overlapping objects, or even piece together the different parts of an object. The patients gradually improved over time, and the new study suggests that dynamic information — that is, input from moving objects — is critical to the brain's ability to learn to segregate objects from their backgrounds (a task known as visual integration).