Visual Neuroscience and Brain-Eye Integration

Vision is a distributed computation: photons captured by photoreceptors are transformed into neural codes that ascend through the retina, lateral geniculate nucleus, and visual cortex to construct perception and guide action. This session connects physiology to perception, explaining how receptive fields emerge, how attention gates signals, and how plasticity remodels circuits after disease or intervention. You’ll see how retinal ganglion cell mosaics, thalamocortical synchrony, and cortical hierarchies (V1 to ventral/dorsal streams) translate into measurable behavior—acuity, contrast sensitivity, motion detection, and visual cognition—and why these signatures matter for diagnostics, device design, and therapy development. We emphasize model-based thinking: linking biophysics to computational representations and then to clinical endpoints that are reproducible and sensitive to change. The page also examines neuromodulators and state (sleep, arousal), the role of eye movements in active vision, and how multisensory integration shapes performance in real-world tasks. For teams bridging bench and clinic, we show how to combine imaging, electrophysiology, and psychophysics into cohesive protocols that quantify mechanism and predict outcome—critical for neuroprotective drugs, cortical rehabilitation, low-vision strategies, and brain–machine interfaces. Across examples, we stress rigorous statistics, longitudinal designs, and harmonized endpoints that accelerate translation and de-risk trials. Visual Neuroscience & Brain-Eye Integration anchors this approach with practical guidance for assay selection (ERG, VEP, OCT/OCTA, fMRI), task design, and data fusion. If you are scanning the landscape for the right Vision Conference to submit your abstract on neural coding, plasticity, or perception, this session outlines a clear path from idea to durable impact. And for newcomers planning objective, quantifiable measures, we recommend starting with visual electrophysiology, then layering imaging and behavior to build a robust, multi-scale picture of vision in health and disease.