First, if this hypothesis is true, then decreasing spatial contrast should “trick” the retina into “believing” the focal plane is in front, and to slow down the eye growth.

We thus propose a possible strategy for the retina to detect the sign of defocus and adjust the eye growth: compute spatial contrast, and it works because of spherical aberrations. This gives two predictions for myopia.

For this we decompose the problem in the two components: the eye optics, that we simulated, and the retina, that we recorded. We displayed to the retina natural images transformed by the eye optics.

…our retina can ! If the image is focused in front of the retina, eye growth is slowed down to try to bring the focal plane into focus. Picture from Carr and Stell.

Myopia is becoming a major public health issue: by 2050, half of the worldwide population should be myopic. Out of these, a significant fraction will be strongly myopic, which comes with a substantial risk of sight-threatening disease.

We found that when we block glycinergic inhibition (red response below) in the retina, the response is still here, but this change of latency disappears.

You might think that this is a just a rebound response, but there is more to it. Schwartz et al showed that when you change the frequency of the flash sequence, the latency of the OSR changes such that the response to the omitted stimulus has always a constant latency.

A long time ago, @gregschwartznu.bsky.social and colleagues discovered that the retina had its own version of the mismatch negativity effect: when you display a sequence of flashes, some ganglion cells (the retinal output), will signal when a flash is missing. www.nature.com/articles/nn1...