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The Eyes Say it All

by Nicole Moore


Written by Nicole Moore

This morning I took a break from my usual sort of sessions and attended the Symposium on Understanding the Developing and Aging Visual Systems.  I am glad that I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about vision in the past few years (both due to curiosity on my part and a desire to be able to field student questions correctly) or I may have found parts of the talks to be impenetrable due to specialized terminology. 
 
I particularly enjoyed Rowan Candy’s talk about the role of accommodation (our ability to change the focal lengths of our eyes in order to see nearby objects clearly) in image quality on the retina of infants, who as a group tend to be hyperopic (far-sighted).   I enjoyed it partially for the bits of information I picked up (like the one above) and also for the thorough discussion of what remains unknown, which apparently includes what signals cause the eye to accommodate.  In general, the session on developing eyes included several delightful discussions of experimental design for working with infants and the special challenges that it poses. 
 
The session on aging eyes was perhaps a bit more of a downer, but it sounds like I have about thirty years left before things really start to go downhill.  This session was particularly well balanced between discussion of the optics of the eye and the receptors.

Posted: 17 Oct 2012 by Nicole Moore