Module Director: Dennis Dacey
206 543-3315
A. Description:
The P/P module employs a full time professional scientific programmer with experience in vision science. The programmer’s goal is to facilitate research progress by efficiently solving large-scale technical computing problems related to the acquisition and/or analysis of neurophysiological or behavioral data, that would be difficult to solve via other resources available to the PIs. Rapid progress in this area is critically dependent on the application of customized computer and display technologies. Research programs that benefit from this module all require the continued development and maintenance of computer hardware and software for data acquisition and analysis. The specific research programs that benefit from this module range in focus from cellular neurophysiology and biophysics to psychophysical measurements of human visual performance. The technical computing problems are often very similar across these very diverse research areas. The CORE programmer seeks to recognize computing problems that are shared across groups with the long-range goal of providing a common toolkit of software resources that will ultimately serve the needs of NEI investigators both within the UW CORE module and at other institutions.
Services:
The P/P module programmer, under the direction of the module director, provides the following specific services: 1) development of acquisition and analysis software for specific research questions; 2) general calibration of video displays; 3) integrating display technologies into data acquisition and analysis software and hardware; 4) consultation with PIs, their students and postdoctorals on programming issues; and 5) maintenance of a new module Website for the purpose of sharing software, hardware and ideas of general interest to the vision community at The University of Washington as well as the NEI funded community nationally.
Location:
The P/P Module Programmer occupies an office (H512) adjacent to the main lab of the module director (H524-525). This office, located adjacent to the National Primate Research Center (NPRC), is central to the NEI funded Staff Scientists and Affiliates of the NPRC (Shadlen, Robinson, Jagadeesh, Kaneko, Fuchs; Dacey), as well as other PIs in Biological Structure (Sherk, Wong) and Physiology and Biophysics (Rieke, Detwiler). Access to researchers in Psychology (Palmer, Buck) can be achieved via computer connection or a 5-minute walk.
B. History of P/HS — P/P Module:
When the National Eye Institute first announced the availability of CORE supplemental funding for clinical vision research modules, application was made, and a Clinical Vision Research Module supplement to the University of Washington CORE grant was funded in 1989. The Module Director, J. Kinyoun, recruited D. Martin, Professor of Biostatistics, to the CORE. Martin was replaced by W. Barlow in 1990, and Barlow became Director of the Biostatistics and Clinical Vision Research Module with the successful competing renewal of 1991.
The evolving guidelines for support of biostatistics modules in the CORE grants placed a heavy emphasis on the development of new clinical studies, particularly prospective randomized trials. Relatively little access to the patient pool locally and limited funding for multicenter collaborative trials nationally made it difficult for the UW vision research community to meet these guidelines. The Biostatistics section of the module was therefore dropped in the 1995 renewal application.
In the meantime, the Psychophysics/Human Subjects (P/HS) part of the module was added at the 1990 renewal, under the direction of Davida Teller. The old Clinical Vision Module was fully replaced by the Psychophysics/Human Subjects module at the 1995 renewal. The P/HS module provided valuable service to researchers in the area of infant vision and infant eye movements, as well as control subjects for clinically motivated studies of infant and child vision.
As of the 2000 renewal, support for the P/HS module was discontinued. There were two reasons for this change. First, although the module had successfully provided support for many CORE investigators, the number of NEI funded investigators who used the infant subjects pool had dropped to one (Teller). Similarly, while the work on molecular genetics of color vision deficiencies continued under NEI funding, the psychophysics aspect of the project had terminated. Hence, the subject pools supported by the P/HS module served few vision CORE investigators. At that time the decision was made to replace the P/HS module with the Psychophysics/Physiology module with the aim of serving a larger segment of the UW vision community working at the level of neural systems function and visual behavior who were then not heavily utilizing any of the existing modules. The Psychophysics/Physiology (P/P) module, as described in this section currently provides a new programming service directed at the technical needs of researchers in the areas of computational, cognitive and systems level visual neuroscience.
C. Publications that Used the P/P Module
Dacey DM, Liao H-W, Peterson BB, McDougal DH, Robinson FR, Smith VC, Pokorny J, Yau K-W, Gamlin PD (2005) Melanopsin-expressing ganglion cells in primate retina project to the LGN and signal both color and irradiance. Nature 433:749-754.
