effects of healthy aging on human primary visual cortex健康老龄化的影响对人类初级视觉皮层.pdfVIP

Vol.4, Special Issue I, 695-702 (2012) Health /10.4236/health.2012.429109 Effects of healthy aging on human primary visual cortex * Alyssa A. Brewer , Brian Barton * Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine, USA; Corresponding Author: aabrewer@ Received 1 August 2012; revised 30 August 2012; accepted 8 September 2012 ABSTRACT 1. INTRODUCTION Aging often results in reduced visual acuity from Human visual cortex can be partitioned into distinct changes in both the eye and neural circuits [1-4]. visual areas which serve separate perceptual functions In normally aging subjects, primary visual cortex and hierarchical stages of visual processing [7,8]. One has been shown to have reduced responses to important organizing principle within many visual areas visual stimulation [5]. It is not known, however, is a topographical map of visual space, also called a vis- to what extent aging affects visual field repre- ual field map. The organization of these maps follows sentations and population receptive sizes in the organization of the retina; hence, retinotopic visual human primary visual cortex. Here we use func- field maps are cortical regions in which nearby neurons tional MRI (fMRI) and population receptive field analyze the properties of nearby points of an image on (pRF) modeling [6] to measure angular and ec- the retina. The