91��ɫ's Centre for vision Research Archives | Research & Innovation

Professor Laurence Harris wins the President's Research Excellence Award

muellerm — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 10:00:00 +0000

Laurence Harris

Laurence Harris, professor of psychology in the Faculty of Health, has been named the recipient of a 2014 President’s Research Excellence Award for his outstanding contributions to multi-sensory research and to 91��ɫ’s research community.

“Professor Harris is a tremendous credit to 91��ɫ and as such is a highly deserving recipient of this year’s Research Excellence Award,” said President and Vice-Chancellor Mamdouh Shoukri. “Throughout his distinguished career at the University, he has demonstrated consistently strong leadership in research and academic excellence, as well as mentorship and student success. One of Canada’s best-known vision scientists, his pioneering research contributions have had far-reaching impact locally, nationally and internationally, and have significantly enriched research life at 91��ɫ and enhanced our reputation as a leading research-intensive university.”

“I am honoured to be the recipient of the 2014 President's Research Excellence Award,” said Harris, who is also the director of 91��ɫ’s Centre for Vision Research, an Organized Research Unit at the University. “The award acknowledges my research and that of my students, and recognizes my contributions to breaking down the artificial barriers that have historically been erected between the senses. The award emphasizes the respect and significance that 91��ɫ attaches to research.”

Introduced four years ago coinciding with 91��ɫ’s 50th anniversary, the award recognizes established, full-time, active faculty members with outstanding research achievement and significant contributions to advance the University’s international reputation for research excellence. It will be presented at the 91��ɫ U Research Leaders event, held on Tuesday, Feb. 25, in recognition of student and faculty research success and to celebrate 91��ɫ’s 2013-14 research achievements.

The Senate Committee on Awards selected Harris from eight nominees to receive this year’s award — a $10,000 internal research grant — for his many achievements as an internationally renowned scholar who has made groundbreaking contributions to the field of multi-sensory research.

Harris, who recently led a $1.9-million project funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation to investigate the role of peripheral vision in balance and self-motion to help reduce the risk of falling in at-risk populations, has published more than 20 book chapters. His work has been published in some 100 peer-reviewed papers, including journals such as Nature, Science and PNAS. A past chair of the Department of Psychology, Harris has also been a dedicated teacher, mentor and citizen of the University.

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Two 91��ɫ profs receive Ontario Early Researcher Awards

fmaquito — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 08:00:00 +0000

91��ɫ Professors Natasha Myers and Thilo Womelsdorf have been awarded $100,000 each in funding under the Ontario government’s Early Researcher Awards program.

Ontario’s Ministry of Economic Development & Innovation announced the awards Monday. 91��ɫ’s research investment of $50,000 will match the funds for the award.

The program helps promising, recently appointed Ontario researchers build research teams of undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, research associates and technicians. The goal of the program is to improve Ontario’s ability to attract and retain the best and brightest research talent. Ontario’s Early Researcher Awards investment of $8.68 million will support 62 emerging researchers and their teams at 19 institutions across the province.

Professor , of the Department of Biology in the Faculty of Science & Engineering and member of 91��ɫ’s Centre for Vision Research, is studying how individuals focus their attention on one object, thought or event, while ignoring other external information. His research examines the three major regions of the brain that guide and determine selective attention, to find out how they work and interact. Womelsdorf’s research will identify how networks of brain cells coordinate separable attention information using state-of-the-art technologies and will critically advance hotly-debated, neuro-economic decision making theories. The research will lead to a better understanding of various diseases that widely affect health, education and the economy of Ontario.

Professor Natasha Myers, of the Department of Anthropology in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, examines how plants are acquiring new status and visibility in our culture. Specifically, she explores the ways that artists and scientists are transforming our everyday assumptions through artworks and experiments that render plants as active, sensing organisms. This ethnographic research with practitioners both in Ontario and at international sites will shed light on the ethical and political significance of these shifts in perception about nonhuman life and the order of things.

“I am most pleased that the Ministry of Research and Economic Development has recognized the achievements of 91��ɫ Professors Natasha Myers and Thilo Womelsdorf, who are actively engaged in conducting globally competitive research in the early stages of their careers,” said Robert Haché, 91��ɫ’s vice-president research & innovation. “Our early career researchers represent the future of research at 91��ɫ and contribute to building Canada’s knowledge-based economy. The funding provided by the Ministry will provide these emerging researchers with resources to build their innovative research programs.”

“This research work is important to helping us meet our health care challenges while fostering long-term job creation and economic growth,” said Brad Duguid, minister of economic development and innovation.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Roving eyes help us see things better and faster

fmaquito — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:00:00 +0000

The saying, “looking at things with fresh eyes”, may be more than just a metaphor, according to new studies led by Professor Kari Hoffman of 91��ɫ’s Centre for Vision Research, which have been published in scholarly journals.

Left: Kari Hoffman

While searching for experiments to use in a research methods course, Hoffman took a fresh look at an old visual perception test and realized it might hold a clue to understanding how we see things and when we remember them. Hoffman says the insight came when she was reviewing results of a flicker-change blindness test, a simple classroom experiment used to show how difficult it is for people to see the difference in two almost identical images or scenes. She realized that what was once a trick of the eye was no longer effective due to her memory of the images.

That led Hoffman and biology graduate student Vivian Chau (right) to develop an experiment that would monitor the eye movement of test subjects as they tried to solve the visual puzzle. What they found was striking: when the viewer remembered the image, the eye movement that indicated the time it took to search and locate the part of the scene that had changed was dramatically reduced compared to when they were viewing it for the first time. This suggested that it was possible to tell when a person was looking at an image for the first time and when they recognized it from memory.

“Not everyone shows the fast search times, though,” says Hoffman. “A participant with amnesia failed to remember the changing objects and his eyes told the story. This participant had suffered damage to his medial temporal lobe, a region which is especially affected in Alzheimer’s patients and has been associated with memory function in healthy aging,” said Hoffman. “So we now have a task to help us study how that brain region functions to support memory formation.”

The study results were published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience ().

After seeing that eye movements could reflect memory, the outcome of brain processing, Hoffman and her lab team wondered if eye movements might also take part in influencing the inputs – how our brain processes images. In a second study, she and psychology graduate student Adrian Bartlett (right) found that eye movement is also an indication of the brain gearing up to process an image – a kind of neural “smart refresh” that created optimal conditions for seeing.

Hoffman says there is a noticeable change in a subject’s brain wave patterns when images are viewed with moving eyes as opposed to the more standard experimental method of viewing images with a fixed eye. “The neural populations become more synchronized,” she explains, “this can make processing an image easier and faster.” They found that the brain has a kind of “smart refresh” period when it gets ready to process visual information. If the presentation isn’t synched to that cycle, the brain is not as good at processing the image.

Designers of learning materials can use this knowledge to create visual presentations that interact with a viewer’s movements, making the displays more easily processed and therefore more effective. The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience ().

Illustration above shows the path the viewer’s eyes followed when scanning the photo for the first time and then again the next day

“Although scientists often study movement as a separate process from perception and cognition,” Hoffman says, “our results reveal examples of how eye movements are intertwined with perceptual and cognitive processes. In both studies, the eye movements give us a more complete picture of perceptual and memory processes,” Hoffman explains.

Exercising the brain in this way, Hoffman says, may be optimal for neural rewiring or “plasticity” that leads to better learning, more efficient performance and recovery after loss of function, such as following stroke. “This provides support for a more integrative view of brain function – one in which actions help shape brain performance.”

For more information on the Perception & Plasticity Lab, visit their website.

The studies, which were conducted in collaboration with researchers Jennifer Ryan, Shayna Rosenbaum and Nikos Logothetis, were funded through an NSERC Discovery Grant and an Ontario MRI Early Researcher Award. Hoffman is a professor in psychology & biology in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Health and a member of the Neuroscience Graduate Diploma Program.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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