ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the visual system adapts to the changes, focusing on how vision adapts to image blur. Exposure to blur—introduced in the stimulus, by the optics of the eye, or by optical correction or ocular treatment—leads to relatively rapid and reversible changes in visual responses to blur. The chapter reviews the general properties and functions of adaptation and discusses how adaptation alters our perception of blur and how and where in the visual system neural adjustments occur. Neural adaptation to blur is instead an example of adjustments that are very general and pervasive, affecting nearly all aspects of visual coding. The function of adaptation to blur might therefore chiefly be to compensate for this optical and neural degradation in order to both optimize spatial resolution and also maintain percepts that are more closely tied to the expected properties of the world than to the sensitivity limits of the observer.
