An Active Efficient Coding Model of Binocular Vision Development Under Normal and Abnormal Rearing Conditions

摘要

The development of binocular vision encompasses the formation of binocular receptive fields tuned to different disparities and the calibration of accurate vergence eye movements. Experiments have shown that this development is impaired when the animal is exposed to certain abnormal rearing conditions such as growing up in an environment that is deprived of horizontal or vertical edges. Here we test the effect of abnormal rearing conditions on a recently proposed computational model of binocular development. The model is formulated in the Active Efficient Coding framework, a generalization of classic efficient coding ideas to active perception. We show that abnormal rearing conditions lead to differences in the model's development that qualitatively match those seen in animal experiments. Furthermore, the model predicts systematic changes in vergence accuracy due to abnormal rearing. We discuss implications of the model for the treatment of developmental disorders of binocular vision such as amblyopia and strabismus.