Each year, around four in 10,000 children worldwide are born with congenital cataract (CC), a rare occurrence by WHO standards, yet the condition accounts for as much as 20 percent of childhood blindness cases.Social cognitive learning theory CC is treatable with simple corrective surgery but in parts of the world where medical facilities are few and far between, this treatment isn't always an option.Social cognitive learning theory

The organization provides life-changing eye surgery to children and young adults with treatable conditions, such as congenital cataract, that cause blindness.Social cognitive learning theory the other mission seeks "to understand how a brain that has been deprived of vision for so many years, whether and how it can learn to acquire visual proficiency at that point in life," sinha explained.Social cognitive learning theory

Your average person enjoys 20/20 vision. That is, they see objects from 20 feet away with the same visual acuity as the rest of the population from the same distance.Social cognitive learning theory if you're near or far-sighted, basic corrective lenses are all that's needed. But the prakash children, as sinha refers to them, often suffer from degraded vision, around 20/100 or five times worse than average.Social cognitive learning theory

What's more, their vision cannot be corrected using glasses or contacts, because there's nothing physiologically wrong with their eyes or any other part of their optical anatomy.Social cognitive learning theory the problem lies within how their brains developed without visual input during infancy. It's this very problem that eventually led to sinha's computer vision eureka moment.Social cognitive learning theory but first, a word on infants and their incredible nearsightedness.

"A big part of the reason [that infants have blurred vision] is that the retina of the baby is quite immature," sinha explained.Social cognitive learning theory he also noted that the cones in our eyes, the specialized cells which provide us with high resolution vision, are, at infancy, much larger than they are in adulthood.Social cognitive learning theory this reduces the density of those cells in the eye and in turn limits the eye's resolving capabilities. As the child grows, the cones become smaller and more tightly packed, improving their visual acuity.Social cognitive learning theory yet their initially poor vision plays a crucial role in their cognitive development. Sinha theorized the same concept might apply to neophyte computer vision systems.Social cognitive learning theory

Essentially, sinha hypothesizes that a baby's poor eyesight acts as a set of "training wheels" for their developing minds. By reducing the high definition detail, their formative minds can focus on more fundamental visual and cognitive development without getting mired down in the details.Social cognitive learning theory evidence suggests that there is a very narrow window of opportunity in a child's early development for this to happen.

Unfortunately for the prakash children, by the time that they receive the surgery, that window has long since passed.Social cognitive learning theory sinha points to a case of a chinese orphan born with congenital cataracts who was adopted by an american family and brought to the US for vision restoration surgery at age six.Social cognitive learning theory while the operation went swimmingly, the child's adoptive parents began to notice that the kid had difficulty making friends.

The child's doctor determined that the issue stemmed from the child's difficulty recognizing and remembering faces -- not because of any optical issues, but because that part of the child's brain didn't fully develop during infancy. "The brain requires a normal face related visual input," sinha said. "And if it's deprived of that input during that critical window, then forevermore it's going to be compromised."

Social cognitive learning theory

This case got sinha and his team thinking about whether AI and computer vision (CV) systems might be trained in the same manner as infants. Rather than overwhelming a learning AI with high definition video inputs, could it instead be trained first on blurring imagery before slowly being weaned onto increasingly high-res inputs.Social cognitive learning theory turns out, the answer is a resounding yes.

The team discovered that when the systems were exposed to blurred images, its receptive field (RF) expanded.Social cognitive learning theory oddly though, "starting with high-resolution images and then later introducing blurred ones leads to a significant increase in RF sizes, but the converse (blurred followed by high-resolution images) does not cause the network to reduce the sizes of the already established large rfs." so it doesn't matter when the CV system sees the blurred images, only that it does.Social cognitive learning theory this conversely could lead to a treatment for the prakash children: artificially blurring their newly restored sight until their brains develop the necessary mechanisms to understand what they're seeing.Social cognitive learning theory

What's more, the storage space and bandwidth saved by utilizing low resolution images could help speed up training times while reducing the size of already-unwieldy training databases.Social cognitive learning theory sinha's research was recently published in the journal, PNAS, though there is no word yet on when this CV training technique might make its way into practical applications.Social cognitive learning theory though I doubt that's of much concern to the thousands of people who can now see for the first time in their lives.