Program

OPTICA FALL VISION MEETING 

2nd-5th October

Hosted by the University of Minnesota 

Click here for electronic version of full program

Schedule overview

Thursday 2nd October 

        17:30-19:30 - Welcome registration, drinks reception CMMR

All sessions are held in the University Recreation and Wellness Centre: 

Friday 3rd October 

08:30-09:00 - Registration / coffee

        09:00-09:15 - Welcome, Chair / LOC?

09:15-11:15 - Invited talk session 1 - Modeling the visual system - From the retina to imagery

Because we can specify its inputs and measure its outputs so clearly, it is possible to produce informative mathematical models of the visual system. This modeling has been a cornerstone of vision science since the earliest days. In this session we explore recent examples of this modeling from the earliest stages (at the retina and V1) through to high level percepts, visual attention and mental imagery.
 

• Rhea Eskew (Northeastern), Qualitative and quantitative differences between increment and decrement contrast responses

• Fred Kingdom (McGill),  When two eyes are worse than one: binocular summation for interocular anti-phase chromatic stimuli

• Miguel Eckstein (UCSB), Emergent Behaviors and Neuronal Mechanisms of Covert Attention in Convolutional Neural Networks

• Thomas Naselaris (UMN), A transformation from vision to mental imagery in the human brain

11:15-11:45 - Break

11:45-13:15 - Contributed talk session I (6x 15 min talks)

• Aislin Sheldon (University of Minnesota), Correlated aperiodic EEG activity and occipital glutamate from 7 tesla MRS in controls but not schizophrenia

• Zhengyang Xu (University of Rochester), High-speed adaptive optics suppresses noise in optical recordings of retinal function

• Leah Johnston (UC Berkeley), Profound perceptual fading of stabilized flicker cannot be accounted for by retinal ganglion cell desensitization

• Daniel Read (University of Leeds), Balancing the gains and losses of fixational eye movements: optimal motion for stimulus detection and localisation

• Robert Cooper (Marquette University and Medical College of Wisconsin), Examining the feasibility of clinical scanning laser ophthalmoscopes for intensity-based optoretinography

• Gislin Dagnelie (Johns Hopkins University), Wide-field eyetracking calibration and validation in a commercial head-mounted display
  
  

13:15-14:30 - Lunch 

14:30-16:30 - Poster session I 

16:30-17:30 - Tillyer Award Lecture

• Susana Marcos (University of Rochester), Why optics needs vision and vision needs optics? 

17:30-20:00 - Conference dinner 

Saturday 4th October

08:30-09:00 - Registration / coffee

        09:00-11:00 - Invited talk session 2 - New technologies for vision science

The retina is highly vascularized and changes in retinal blood flow are linked to many clinical conditions. However, until recently our ability to detect changes in retinal vasculature and metabolism has been extremely limited. In this session we will hear how advances in optical and MR methods are trasforming the in vivo detection of normal and abnormal retinal physiology with profound implications for future clinical diagnostics.

• Amani Fawzi (Northwestern), Quantifying Vascular Mural Cells and Capillary Pericytes in-vivo:clinical implications

• Eric Muir (UNC), MRI of Ocular Physiology

• Jesse Schallek (University of Rochester), Imaging the sub-cellular microstructure of mitochondria and blood flow in the living eye

• Steve Burns (Indiana U), Adaptive Optics SLO imaging optimized for retinal vascular measurements

        11:00-11:15 - Break

11:15-12:45 - Contributed talk session II (6x 15 min talks)

• Colin Flowers (University of Minnesota), Personalized remapping of letter locations aids single word reading in people with central vision loss

• Fabian Coupette (University of Leeds), Do fixational eye movements improve or impair detection?

• Elnaz Bailey (Johns Hopkins University), Development of calibrated performance measures for low vision assessment in real-world and VR settings

• Anqi Zhang (UC, Santa Barbara), Should I Drill or Should I Scan? An Ideal 3D Searcher Analysis

• Hannah Doyle (UC Berkeley), Fixational Eye Motion Compensates for Emulated Cone Loss

• Tiasha Saha Roy (University of Minnesota),Mental imagery produces low-dimensional projections of visual representations in the human brain

12:45-13:45 - Lunch 

        13:45-15:45 - Invited talk session 3 - Advances in functional MR imaging of the visual system

The human visual system was one of the original targets for fMRI  in the mid-90s and, because its physiology is so well characterized, it is still at the forefront of technical innovation for this imaging methodology. This session's talks cover  the state of the art in the application of fMRI to human vision system including high-field, sub-millimeter fMRI and novel approaches to computational modeling of the BOLD data and large-scale data collection.

• Jon Winawer (NYU), Individual differences in human V4 surface area predict crowding distance

• Shahin Nasr (MGH), High-Resolution FMRI Unravels the Functional Organization of the Visual System in Neurotypical and Amblyopic Individuals

• Kalanit Grill-Spector (Stanford), A New Framework for Estimating Spatiotemporal Population Receptive Fields in the Human Visual System

• Kendrick Kay (UMN), What is the Natural Scenes Dataset, and what is it good for?

15:45-16:00 - Break

16:00-17:00 - Poster session II

17:00-17:30 - Business Meeting

17:30-18:30 - Boynton Award Lecture 

•  Austin Roorda (University of Waterloo),  Field Guide to Oz Vision

18:30 - Evening entertainment - own arrangements

Sunday 5th October

          08:30-09:00 - Registration and refreshments

          09:00-10:30 - Invited: 40 Years of Reading (Special session): 

This session celebrates the remarkable progress in understanding how we read, spanning psychophysics, visual neuroscience, and clinical applications. It honors Gordon Legge, recipient of the 2024 Tillyer Award, whose pioneering work has shaped the field through decades of research on peripheral reading and vision loss. 

• Gordon Legge - 2024 Tillyer Awardee-  (UMN) Psychophysics of Reading in Normal and Low Vision: Then and Now

• Susana Chung (UC Berkeley) Reading in normal periphery and in the presence of central vision loss

• Denis Pelli (NYU) Testing reading online
  
  

10:30-10:45 - Break 

10:45-11:45 - Contributed talk session III (4x 15 min talks)

• Hannah Smithson (University of Oxford), Limits on visual estimates of the composition  of translucent liquids when lighting angle is varied

• John Mollon (Cambridge University), Two distinct types of visual comparison

• Valerie Nunez (Stony Brook University), Investigating neural mechanisms of color appearance: color saturation, cone contrast, and cortical dynamics

• Ann Elsner (Indiana University), Visual acuity with a 3 mm pupil and Maxwellian view: subjective vs. objective focus in exudative retinal disease
  
  

11:45-12:00 - Concluding remarks