Projects

Tracking a target in depth with central field loss

Bilateral field loss due to maculopathy creates a scotoma that extends in depth — a volume scotoma. Morevoer the size of the scotoma depends on whether observers turn their eyes to track a target as it comes closer. This project investigates how the volume scotoma affects the ability to track oncoming targets in these individuals, and in controls with a simulated volume scotoma.

Reverberant Auditory Scene Analysis

The world is rich in sounds and their echoes from reflecting surfaces, making acoustic reverberation a ubiquitous part of everyday life. We usually think of reverberation as a nuisance to overcome (it makes understanding speech or locating sound sources harder), but it also carries useful information, acting as a signature of the space it fills. Reverberation can tell us how big a room is, where we are inside it, and whether there are objects nearby. This has important implications not only for auditory spatial perception in typical individuals, but also in people with sensory loss. Sound…

Patterns of Visual Deficits in Amblyopia

Background Amblyopia means blunted sight in the Greek language and is a term clinicians use to describe decreased vision usually in one eye most commonly due to a focusing error (refractive error in one eye, very different from other eye - anisometropia) and/or a misalignment between the two eyes (strabismus or squint). Amblyopia is sometimes called “lazy eye”. This is different than being just near or far sighted which is a refractive error usually similar and in both eyes developing at any age and vision improves instantly on prescribing and wearing spectacles to correct the error.

Oculomotor Control

The binocular coordination of movements of the eyes is a complex issue controlled by many brainstem nuclei, and is subject to a wide variety of forms of disruption by traumatic brain injury and oculomotor muscles disorders. The goal of this project is to characterize the natural range of the dynamics of the binocular ocuomotor system and their widespread disruptions across the spectrum of human ocolumotor control.

Harnessing the Power of Drawing for the Enhancement of Learning across Levels of Vision Function

Recent scientific findings about art and drawing suggest that drawing can facilitate learning in a wide variety of domains. The proposed collaboration will develop an interdisciplinary research program aimed at harnessing the power of drawing to enhance learning across fields of intellectual endeavor.