Visual Neuroscience Laboratory

Ongoing Research Projects

Neural Coding of Visual Movement and Attention

Human patients with damage to their visual cortex can detect moving visual stimuli without conscious perception of those objects, a phenomenon known as “blindsight”. This residual visual function is thought to be mediated by a pathway involving the superior colliculus, pulvinar and extrastriate visual cortex. This unconscious pathway processes information about visual movement and also likely mediates aspects of attention. We are conducting anatomical, physiological and optical brain imaging studies in an animal model to determine how neural information is transferred in this pathway. Our experiments should help to uncover mechanisms of visual motion coding that are common to all mammals, and may also provide information relevant to the treatment of disorders of motion processing such as dyslexia, schizophrenia, autism and Williams syndrome.