OSA Vision Meeting

The 6th annual Optical Society of America Vision Meeting will be held at the University of Rochester on October 6, 7, and 8, 2006. This year's meeting, which will be sponsored by the Center for Visual Science, coincides with the 90th Anniversary of OSA's founding right here in Rochester! Frontiers in Optics, the Annual Meeting of the Optical Society of America, will immediately follow the OSA Vision Meeting. Meeting details can be found at www.cvs.rochester.edu/fvm_2006/index.html. As in past years, the Optical Society of America will offer a one-day "free pass" to all OSA members who are pre-registered for the OSA Vision Meeting to attend the OSA Annual Meeting on Monday, October 9, at which there will be additional vision sessions.

Meeting Overview:

The OSA Vision Meeting is a low cost, high quality meeting designed to focus discussion on key issues in vision science. The registration fee will be $50 for students/postdocs and $200 for all others. The fee will increase to $100 for students/postdocs and $250 for all others after the registration deadline of September 1, 2006. (Note that the registration fee includes breakfast, lunch, and coffee breaks for all 3 days plus dinner for one night). This year's meeting will celebrate Donald I.A. MacLeaod as the 2006 recipient of the Tillyer Award. The Young Investigator Award, which includes a cash prize, will be given to the student or post-doc who gives the best presentation at the meeting.

The local organizing committee is chaired by David Williams (University of Rochester) and Ione Fine (University of Southern California) chairs the program committee.

The main strength of the OSA Vision Meeting is its small size, which allows for engaging scientific discussion among colleagues. The year's meeting is organized around 7 workshops, each with 4 invited speakers and a format designed to promote active discussion of key issues in vision science. There will be no parallel sessions. We encourage contributed posters to be displayed during sessions held in series with the workshops. There will be some limited time available for contributed talks; we expect to schedule 2 contributed talk sessions (6 talks in each) from the contributed abstracts. All of the abstracts accepted for this year's meeting (including the invited ones) will be published in the online Journal of Vision.

Sessions (* indicates tentative)

Neural Coding in the Retina
Moderator: Horace Barlow*, Cambridge University

Jonathan Demb, University of Michigan
"Cellular mechanisms for visual adaptation"

Eero Simoncelli, New York University
"Characterizing the complete visual signal in a patch of retina"

Sheila Nirenberg, Cornell Medical School
"Ruling out and ruling in neural codes"

Marcus Meister*, Harvard University
"Retinal processing of eye movements"


Multi-sensory Processing and Cross-modal Plasticity
Moderator: Daphne Bavelier *, University of Rochester

Liz Romanski, University of Rochester
"Integration of auditory and visual communication information in the primate prefrontal cortex"

Maurice Ptito, Université de Montréal
"Cross-modal plasticity: lessons from the visual system"

Amir Amedi, Harvard Center for Non-Invasive Magnetic Brain Stimulation
"Towards closing the gap between visual neuroprostheses and sign restoration: Insights from studying vision, cross-modal plasticity and sensory substitution"

Jean-René Duhamel, Institut des Sciences Cognitives, CNRS
"Parietal mechanisms of multisensory integration in non-human primates"


Color Categories, Sensations, and Their Neural Circuits
Moderator: Mike Webster, University of Nevada-Reno

Rolf Kuehni, North Carolina State University
"What the World Color Survey tells about hue-based basic color categories"

Sophie Wuerger, The University of Liverpool
"The cone inputs to the unique hue mechanisms"

Heidi Hofer, University of Houston
Title TBA

Clyde Hardin, Syracuse University
Title TBA


Cortical and Sub-cortical Circuitry
Moderator: Tony Movshon, New York University

Matteo Carandini, SKERI
"Imaging the dynamics of population responses in visual cortex"

Murray Sherman, University of Chicago
"The role of thalamus in processing visual information"

David Ferster, Northwestern University
"How threshold shapes cortical selectivity"

Marty Usrey, University of California-Davis
"Dynamic properties of thalamic neurons for vision"

Vision and Reading
Moderator: Maureen Powers, Gemstone Foundation

Bob Dougherty, Stanford University
Title TBA

Joel Talcott, Aston University
Title TBA

Eric Borsting, Southern California College of Optometry
Title TBA

Mark S. Seidenberg, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Title TBA


Evolution of Opsins and Color Vision
Moderator: TBA

Shozo Yokoyama, Emory University
"General evolution of the opsins in vertebrates"

David Hunt, University College London
"Evolution of opsins in primates"

Maureen Neitz, Medical College of Wisconsin
"Evolution of opsins and inter-individual variability in humans"

Daniel Osorio, University of Sussex
"Ecology of primate color vision evolution"


Retinal Structure & Function Revealed with High-resolution Imaging
Moderator: Wolfgang Drexler, Medical University Vienna

Stacey Choi, University of California-Davis
"Structure/function relationships in retinal disease revealed with high-resolution retinal imaging"

Yoshikazu Imanishi, Case Western Reserve University
"Noninvasive two-photon imaging reveals retinyl ester storage structures in the eye"

Scott Stevenson, University of Houston
"Eye movement recording and retinal image stabilization with the AO-SLO"

Kostadinka Bizheva, University of Waterloo
"Depth-resolved optical probing of retina physiology with functional ultra-high resolution optical coherence tomography"