Event Date
Thursday, December 9th, 2021 – 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Speaker
Dr. Stephen Ramanoel Associate Professor, University of Côte d’Azur LAMHESS, Nice, France and adjoint faculty member at the Vision Institute of Paris/Sorbonne University
Host
Kate Agathos Post-Doctoral Fellow
Abstract
AbstractThe 21st century is marked by a demographic “graying” of the global population. In this context, spatial navigation as a complex behavior encompassing perceptual, cognitive, and motor processes, provides an ideal framework for the study of normal and pathological aging. Older adults exhibit prominent impairments in their capacity to navigate efficiently, reorient in unfamiliar environments, or update their path when faced with obstacles. These changes in navigation capabilities reduce older adults’ autonomy and mobility, resulting in an increased risk of progression of age-related disorders. This decline in navigational capabilities has traditionally been ascribed to memory impairments and dysexecutive function whereas the impact of visual aging has often been overlooked. The ability to perceive visuo-spatial information such as the overall layout of an environment or the salient landmarks it contains is essential to navigate in space efficiently. To date, the functional and neurobiological factors responsible for the deterioration of visuo-spatial functions in healthy and pathological aging remain insufficiently characterized. To address this issue, we implement a highly interdisciplinary approach, bringing together clinical, psychophysical, and behavioral assessments as well as neuroimaging paradigms combining morphometric measurements, connectivity analyses, fMRI, mobile EEG, and virtual reality. During this seminar, I will present some experimental results from healthy young and older participants using an integrative approach from passive perception of visual scenes to active navigation tasks. This work allows a better comprehension of the neural dynamics subtending visual and navigation processing and it provides new insights for the development of innovative remediation methods, such as visual devices or spatial environment designs, in order to improve the autonomy and healthcare of these populations. http://www.aging-vision-action.fr/people/stephen-ramanoel/ https://univ-cotedazur.fr/annuaire/m-stephen-ramanoel Improving Zoom accessibility for people with hearing impairments People with hearing impairments often use lipreading and speechreading to improve speech comprehension. This approach is helpful but only works if the speaker’s face and mouth are clearly visible. For the benefit of people with hearing impairments on Zoom calls, please enable your device’s camera whenever you are speaking on Zoom, and face the camera while you speak. (Feel free to disable your camera when you aren’t speaking.)