Basic and Clinical Perspectives in Vision Research

I have been asked to write a brief foreword to this volume honoring Hisako Ikeda, providing a review of the accomplishments in our field over the past four decades, when Hisako was an active participant. This I am delighted to do. It has been a most exciting time in vision research and Hisako has been right in the middle of much of the excitement, publishing on a wide variety of topics and providing much new data and many new insights. Hisako's research career can be divided by decades into four quite distinct areas of inquiry. In the 1950s, as a student in Japan, her research interests were psychophysical in nature, and she was concerned with visual illusions, figural aftereffects, and motion detec tion. In the 1960s, after her move to London, she began electrophysiological studies. Much of her work in the 1960s was concerned with the electroretinogram (ERG), its components, and the use of this electrical response for evaluating spectral sensitivities of the eye and retinal degenerations. This work represented the beginning of her electrodiagnostic clinical work, which continued until her retirement.

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Section I: Ocular Structure, Function and Disease.- 1. A Study of Pupil Response Components in Human Vision.- 2. Factors Regulating the Blood Flow in the Optic Nerve Head.- Section II: Retinal Structure, Function and Disease.- 3. The Architecture of Functional Neural Circuits in the Cat Retina.- 4. Rhodopsin Gene Mutations Causing Retinitis Pigmentosa: Functional Phenotypes of Codon 23 and Codon 135 Genotypes.- 5. The Regulatory Role of Dopaminergic Pathways in the Mammalian Outer Retina.- 6. Spatio-Chromatic Signalling in the Vertebrate Retina.- 7. ON-Bipolar Cells, Visual Sensitivity and the b-Wave.- 8. Effects of Gaba Receptor Agonists on Cholinergic Amacrine Cells in the Rabbit Retina.- 9. Ramifications of Gaba Receptor Subtypes on Retinal Information Processing.- 10. Postnatal Development of Neurotransmitter Systems in the Mammalian Retina.- 11. Impaired Dynamics of Retinal Processing in Dopaminergic Deficiency States in Man and Monkey.- Section III: Higher Visual Centers: Structure, Function and Disease.- 12. The Role of the Pretectum in the Pupillary Light Reflex.- 13. From Spatiotemporal Tuning to Velocity Analysis.- 14. Binocular Integration in the Visual Cortex.- 15. Visual Cortical Plasticity and Neurotrophic Factors.- 16. Residual Visual Function in the Absence of the Human Striate Cortex.- Contributors.- Participants.