Rapid motion adaptation reveals the temporal dynamics of spatiotemporal correlation between ON and OFF pathways

At the early stages of visual processing, information is processed by two major thalamic pathways encoding brightness increments (ON) and decrements (OFF). Accumulating evidence suggests that these pathways interact and merge as early as in primary visual cortex. Using regular and reverse-phi motion in a rapid adaptation paradigm, we investigated the temporal dynamics of within and across pathway mechanisms for motion processing. When the adaptation duration was short (188 ms), reverse-phi and regular motion led to similar adaptation effects, suggesting that the information from the two pathways are combined efficiently at early-stages of motion processing. However, as the adaption duration was increased to 752 ms, reverse-phi and regular motion showed distinct adaptation effects depending on the test pattern used, either engaging spatiotemporal correlation between the same or opposite contrast polarities. Overall, these findings indicate that spatiotemporal correlation within and across ON-OFF pathways for motion processing can be selectively adapted, and support those models that integrate within and across pathway mechanisms for motion processing

Report on the Third ESCA TTS workshop evaluation procedure.

This paper provides a description and rationale for the EvaluationProcedure taking place at the Workshop. The procedure has threegoals. First, setting a precedent of providing conference participantswith a more candid and thorough picture of the quality of current TTS systems than is usually available in the form of prepared conference demonstrations. Second, providing results that will be informative for TTS systems developers. Third, stimulating a discussion and contributing to a consensus building process on text-to-speech synthesis evaluation