Induced astigmatism biases the orientation information represented in multivariate electroencephalogram activities

A small physical change in the eye influences the entire neural information process along the visual pathway, causing perceptual errors and behavioral changes. Astigmatism, a refractive error in which visual images do not evenly focus on the retina, modulates visual perception, and the accompanying neural processes in the brain. However, studies on the neural representation of visual stimuli in astigmatism are scarce. We investigated the relationship between retinal input distortions and neural bias in astigmatism and how modulated neural information causes a perceptual error. We induced astigmatism by placing a cylindrical lens on the dominant eye of human participants, while they reported the orientations of the presented Gabor patches. The simultaneously recorded electroencephalogram activity revealed that stimulus orientation information estimated from the multivariate electroencephalogram activity was biased away from the neural representation of the astigmatic axis and predictive of behavioral bias. The representational neural dynamics underlying the perceptual error revealed the temporal state transition; it was transiently dynamic and unstable (approximately 350 ms from stimulus onset) that soon stabilized. The biased stimulus orientation information represented by the spatially distributed electroencephalogram activity mediated the distorted retinal images and biased orientation perception in induced astigmatism.
In this study, we investigated the neural sources of perceptual error induced by the astigmatic distortion of the retinal image. We found a systematic distortion in the neural orientation representation estimated from the multivariate analysis of the electroencephalogram recordings, which supports the observed patterns of perceptual error.