In the current state of sight restoration technology, these devices cause early on- and off-center retinal cells to fire simultaneously, rather than in a biologically complementary fashion (i.e. when on-cells fire, off-cells in the same location are suppressed). This creates deeply unnatural population responses that propagate from the retina to cortex. The central question of this research is whether patients have the potential to access cortical plasticity in adulthood that allows them to decode unnatural cell population responses in early visual processing caused by electronic prosthesis technologies.
This video game was created as part of a perceptual learning study in which sighted participants view distorted images designed to rougly mimic the known population coding distortions caused by an electronic sight recovery technologies. Each frame of the game will be filtered in real time to produce these distortions. A large body of research indicates that video games can produce a surprising amount of plasticity. If these 'virtual patients' succeed in decoding the distorted images, this would provide developers of sight restoration technology with support for their hope that patients will be able to successfully adapt to retinal and cortical implants, as well as optogenetic technologies.
This game was designed to mimic the well-known game 'Fruit Ninja'. However, rather than participants slashing 'fruits', they are tasked with slashing objects. The game has 6 levels, and each level increases in difficulty by 1) the objects appearing smaller and smaller and 2) flying on screen with increasing frequency. The goal of the game is to slash as many objects as possible, while avoiding distractors.