Contributed Talks III: Pulse trains to percepts: A virtual patient describing the perceptual effects of human visual cortical stimulation

Here we describe how computational models or 'virtual patients', based on the neurophysiological architecture of V1, can be used to predict the perceptual experience of cortical implant patients. Our virtual patient model can successfully describe psychophysical data from a wide range of previously published studies describing the location, size, brightness and spatiotemporal shape of electrically induced percepts in humans. Our simulations suggest that, in the foreseeable future, the perceptual quality of cortical prosthetic devices is likely to be limited by the neurophysiological organization of the visual cortex, rather than the size and spacing of electrodes.