Projects

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…

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.

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.

The purpose of this research study is to learn about how cerebral visual impairment affects everyday visually guided behaviours and determine interventions to treat the difficulties. This study is conducted remotely through telephone or video link and also in person at the laboratory.

[Under construction]

Neuroimaging techniques such as EEG/MEG and fMRI offer the potential to trace the propagation of Braille information through the brain as it transforms from a dot pattern to meaningful alphabetic information, and comparing this to the analogous processing stream of printed letters in sighted people.

tScratch: Tangible Programming Environment Targeted for Students who are Blind or Visually Impaired

Introductory programming languages are overwhelmingly designed with sighted students in mind. Our goal is to expand and enhance scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/), a block-based visual programming language and online community targeted primarily at children with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) concepts. The addition of tactile programming tiles, a specialized haptic coding grid, and an auditory interface will provide beginning programming instruction for students either as individual…

[Under construction]

When blind persons read braille, a system of raised dots for tactile reading and writing, how is the information processed? How do a few indentations on the fingerpads translate to linguistic information, and how does the text, in turn, influence the motions of the hands reading it? Our work on braille addresses these processes on several levels.