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Activity (Hands-On)Grades 9 - 12

Panoptes and the Bionic Eye

Two images: A black ink drawing shows a strong, bearded man with a cloth draped around his waist, holding a long staff; his bald head is covered with many eyes. A photograph of a blue peacock with tail feathers spread, showing a scattering of many eye-shapes in the feathers' coloring.Greek mythology tells us of Argus Panoptes, the "all-seeing" watchman giant and how his 100 eyes were preserved forever in the peacock's tail feathers.

Vision is the primary sense of many animals and much is known about how vision is processed in the mammalian nervous system. One distinct property of the primary visual cortex is a highly organized pattern of sensitivity to location and orientation of objects in the visual field. But how did we learn this? An important tool is the ability to design experiments to map out the structure and response of a system such as vision. In this activity, students learn about the visual system and then conduct a model experiment to map the visual field response of a Panoptes robot. (In Greek mythology, Argus Panoptes was the "all-seeing" watchman giant with 100 eyes.) A simple activity modification enables a true black box experiment, in which students do not directly observe how the visual system is configured, and must match the input to the output in order to reconstruct the unseen system inside the box.

Animal vision is a remarkable system that serves as a model for engineers to design machines capable of "seeing." Engineers also apply their understanding of the visual system to design retinal prostheses that are implanted in the eyes of people with damaged photoreceptor cells in order to restore vision by directly stimulating optic nerve cells—an amazing biomedical invention.A photograph shows a technician in a white clean suit and lab glasses inspecting what looks like a tiny and shiny, thin and flexible piece of material, held by tweezers.Today, engineers are helping to restore peoples' sight by designing retinal implants.

In this activity, students get a taste of the real-world methodology for a model experiment inspired from the neuroscience of vision. The concept of mapping a system's response in a black box setting, in which one indirectly observes a system via its input-output relationship, is universal in science and engineering. Additionally, this lab illustrates the value of processing experimental results in order to reduce large datasets to compact and meaningful summaries.

After this activity, students should be able to:

  • Describe an overview of the visual pathway of the nervous system.
  • Explain what we can learn about the visual system model through the proposed experiment (that is, the spatial concentration of light sensitivity of each sensor [the "receptive field"], and how the sensors are arranged as a group).
  • Read a plot of experimental data.
  • Interpret experimental data and reduce the data to a more summary graphic.

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