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Research Description:

The Human Vision and Eye Movement Laboratory studies higher cerebral visual and ocular motor function in people. We use three main methodologic approaches: normal human psychophysics, studies in neurologic populations, and MRI studies (fMRI and DTI), supplemented by collaborations with researchers using event-related potentials and MEG. Our study areas include two main themes:

1. object recognition: we have an extensive program investigating face recognition as the best paradigm of high-level object recognition. We direct a multi-center study of acquired prosopagnosia, recruiting patients internationally for extensive fMRI, behavioural, MEG and ERP testing. We are investigating face adaptation effects and spatial frequency preferences as well. In addition to face recognition we have programs on navigational orientation and object expertise.


2. saccadic programming: we explore how saccades can be used to inform us about volitional control, in the performance of antisaccades. We examine how these difficult eye movements reveal the influences of distractors on trajectory, the inter-trial contexts that change one eye movement as a function of the previous response, and how goal representations interact in space and time. These behavioural results are translated into paradigms for fMRI work and studies in schizophrenia.

Additional areas of study include the attentional processing in Balint's syndrome, scanpath generation in face and scene processing by controls, autistic subjects and patients with visual agnosia, and the neuroanatomy of motion processing in collaboration with Debbie Giaschi.

Lab Staff

Magnetic resonance image of a healthy subject from a functional imaging experiment, contrasting brain signal when viewing faces versus other objects: the red region is the 'Fusiform face area'.

 

Recent Publications

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