ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Neuronal nonlinearity explains greater visual spatial resolution for darks than lights.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 83 papers.
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Who cites it
83 citing papers in PubMed, 148 citations in OpenAlex.
- Temporal coding enables hyperacuity in event-based vision.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Anomalous contrast as an adaptive violation of the Talbot-Plateau law.Documenta ophthalmologica. Advances in ophthalmology · 2026Article
- Human accommodative visuomotor function is driven by contrast through ON and OFF pathways and is enhanced in myopia.Cell reports · 2026Article
- Visual Distortions in Human Amblyopia Are Correlated with Deficits in Contrast Sensitivity.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Relative Role of ON/OFF Pathways in Resolving and Adapting to Blur in Myopes and Emmetropes.Investigative ophthalmology & visual science · 2025Article
- Article
- Sensitivity to the number of colors in textures defined by luminance and chromatic contrast.Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics, image science, and vision · 2025Article
- Interocular suppression in chromoluminance patterns measured with SSVEP.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Stronger premicrosaccadic sensitivity enhancement for dark contrasts in the primate superior colliculus.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Visual Field Asymmetries in Responses to ON and OFF Pathway Biasing Stimuli.Visual neuroscience · 2024Article
- Plaid masking explained with input-dependent dendritic nonlinearities.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Regional tuning of photoreceptor adaptation in the primate retina.Nature communications · 2024Article
- A comprehensive data-driven model of cat primary visual cortex.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- A virtual patient simulation modeling the neural and perceptual effects of human visual cortical stimulation, from pulse trains to percepts.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Primate retina trades single-photon detection for high-fidelity contrast encoding.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Predicting Single Neuron Responses of the Primary Visual Cortex with Deep Learning Model.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2024Article
- Asymmetries between achromatic increments and decrements: Perceptual scales and discrimination thresholds.Journal of vision · 2024Article
- Contrast Sensitivity of ON and OFF Human Retinal Pathways in Myopia.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- The neural origin for asymmetric coding of surface color in the primate visual cortex.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Understanding contrast perception in amblyopia: a psychophysical analysis of the ON and OFF visual pathways.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
23 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Astronomers and physicists noticed centuries ago that visual spatial resolution is higher for dark than light stimuli, but the neuronal mechanisms for this perceptual asymmetry remain unknown. Here we demonstrate that the asymmetry is caused by a neuronal nonlinearity in the early visual pathway. We show that neurons driven by darks (OFF neurons) increase their responses roughly linearly with luminance decrements, independent of the background luminance. However, neurons driven by lights (ON neurons) saturate their responses with small increases in luminance and need bright backgrounds to approach the linearity of OFF neurons. We show that, as a consequence of this difference in linearity, receptive fields are larger in ON than OFF thalamic neurons, and cortical neurons are more strongly driven by darks than lights at low spatial frequencies. This ON/OFF asymmetry in linearity could be demonstrated in the visual cortex of cats, monkeys, and humans and in the cat visual thalamus. Furthermore, in the cat visual thalamus, we show that the neuronal nonlinearity is present at the ON receptive field center of ON-center neurons and ON receptive field surround of OFF-center neurons, suggesting an origin at the level of the photoreceptor. These results demonstrate a fundamental difference in visual processing between ON and OFF channels and reveal a competitive advantage for OFF neurons over ON neurons at low spatial frequencies, which could be important during cortical development when retinal images are blurred by immature optics in infant eyes.
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