The committee consists of 5 most recent past presidents who are no longer on the Board of the Vision Sciences Society. The current VSS President sits on the committee to oversee the selection process, but does not have voting rights.
Eli Brenner, Chair
David Brainard
Eileen Kowler
Jeffrey Schall
Laurie Wilcox
Geoff Boynton, President

Members are appointed by the Board to a three-year term.

Anya Hurlbert, Chair
Marlene Behrmann
Miguel Eckstein
Yoko Mizokami
Jan Theeuwes

The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Jan J. Koenderink with the 2017 Ken Nakayama Medal for Excellence in Vision Science.

The Ken Nakayama Medal is in honor of Professor Ken Nakayama’s contributions to the Vision Sciences Society, as well as his innovations and excellence to the domain of vision sciences.

The winner of the Ken Nakayama Medal receives this honor for high-impact work that has made a lasting contribution in vision science in the broadest sense. The nature of this work can be fundamental, clinical or applied. The Medal is not a lifetime career award and is open to all career stages.

The medal will be presented during the VSS Awards session on Monday, May 22, 2017, 12:30 pm in Talk Room 2.

Jan J. Koenderink

Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium, Department of Experimental Psychology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands and Abteilung Allgemeine Psychologie, Justus-Liebig Universität, Giessen, Germany

Only a few scientists can be proud of a real breakthrough in vision science, very few can claim significant advances in multiple aspects of our visual experience, and almost none is an acclaimed researcher in two distinct disciplines. Jan Koenderink is this unique vision scientist. In both human and machine vision, Jan Koenderink has contributed countless breakthroughs towards our understanding of the properties of receptive field profiles, of the different types of optic flow, of the surface characteristics of three-dimensional shape, and more recently of the space of color vision.

Together with his lifelong collaborator Andrea van Doorn, Jan Koenderink has approached each new problem in a humble, meticulous, and elegant way. While some papers may scare the less mathematical inclined reader, a bit of perseverance inevitably leads to the excitement of sharing with him a true insight. These insights have profoundly influenced our understanding of the functioning of the visual system. Some examples include: the structure of images seen through the lens of incremental blurring that led to the now ubiquitous wavelet representation of images, the minimal number of points and views to reconstruct a unique class of three-dimensional structures known as affine representations, the formal description of Alberti’s inventory of shapes from basic differential geometry principles, the careful description of the interplay between illumination and surface reflectance and texture, and many more. The approach of Jan Koenderink to systematically work in parallel on theoretical derivations and on psychophysical experimentations reminds us that behavioral results are uninterpretable without a theoretical framework, and that theoretical advances remain detached from reality without behavioral evidence.

Jan Koenderink trained in astronomy with Maarten Minnaert at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and then in physics and mathematics. He earned his PhD in artificial intelligence and visual psychophysics with Maarten Bouman from Utrecht. He held faculty positions in Utrecht and Groningen in the Netherlands, and guest professorships from Delft University of Technology, MIT in the USA, Oxford in the UK, and KU Leuven in Belgium. Most significantly, he headed the “Physics of Man” department at the University of Utrecht for more than 30 years. Jan Koenderink has authored more than 700 original research articles and published 2 books of more than 700 pages each. He received many honors, among them a Doctor Honoris Causa in Medicine from KU Leuven, the Azriel Rosenfeld lifelong achievement award in Computer Vision, the Wolfgang Metzger award, the Alexander von Humboldt prize, and is a fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Janneke F.M. Jehee with the 2017 Young Investigator Award

Janneke F.M. Jehee

Principal Investigator at the Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands

Uncertainty and optimization in human vision

Dr. Jehee will talk during the Awards Session
Monday, May 22, 2017, 12:30 – 1:30 pm, Talk Room 2

We tend to trust our eyes, believing them to be reliable purveyors of information about our visual environment. In truth, however, the signals they produce from moment to moment are noisy and incomplete. How do we ‘decide’ what we see based on such limited and uncertain information? In this talk, I will present theoretical as well as experimental work to address this question. I will first discuss a computational model of predictive neural coding. The model suggests that the visual system may use top-down interactions between areas to reduce the degree of uncertainty in its perceptual representations. I will then present experimental findings on top-down attention and perceptual learning, and show that these processes reduce the uncertainty in the representation of stimulus features in visual cortex. Finally, I will present recent neuroimaging results indicating that the degree of uncertainty in cortical representations can be characterized on a trial-by-trial basis. This work shows that the fidelity of visual representations can be directly linked to the observer’s perceptual decisions.

Biography

Janneke F.M. Jehee is a tenured Principal Investigator at the Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, where she directs the Visual Computation & Neuroimaging group. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Amsterdam under the direction of Victor Lamme. She then moved on to postdoctoral work, first in computational neuroscience at the University of Rochester with Dana Ballard, and then in fMRI research at Vanderbilt University with Frank Tong. Dr. Jehee’s work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research and the European Research Council.

Dr. Jehee works on the fundamental problem of understanding how the brain represents the visual properties of the environment. Her contributions have used multiple approaches, including computational modeling, psychophysical experimentation and fMRI, to study the interaction between the bottom-up encoding of stimulus features and top-down influences, such as predictability, attention, and learning. She has developed a series of innovative and rigorous computational models of neural coding, and tested those models against data from single neurons and fMRI, as well as psychophysical observations. In her early work, which was focused on predictive neural coding, she developed models showing that predictive feedback could account for aspects of the tuning properties of cortical neurons, as well as the temporal response properties of neurons in the lateral geniculate nucleus. She also contributed to the development of a neural model of temporal coding based on timed circuits in the gamma frequency range.

In her fMRI research, Dr. Jehee has conducted important studies that have shed light on the neural mechanisms of spatial and feature-based attention, and the impact of perceptual learning on early visual cortical representations. In collaboration with her students and colleagues at the Donders Institute, she tackled an important conundrum regarding predictive neural coding, namely, why neural signals for predictable stimuli are typically suppressed relative to those for novel stimuli, while neural signals for attended stimuli are often enhanced. Jehee showed that while the strength of signals representing highly predictable stimuli may be suppressed, the precision of the neural representation of these stimuli is improved.

In more recent, ground-breaking work, Jehee and her lab developed a new technique that can estimate the neural uncertainty of visuocortical representations of stimuli on a moment-to-moment basis, directly linking neural uncertainty to perceptual decisions of the observer.

In addition to these stellar research accomplishments, Dr. Jehee has participated in the training of many graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, who attest to her creativity, courage and unwavering dedication and devotion to both the work and to the students she is training.

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VSS established the Davida Teller Award in 2013. Davida was an exceptional scientist, mentor and colleague, who for many years led the field of visual development. The award is therefore given to an outstanding woman vision scientist with a strong history of mentoring.

Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Dr. Mary Hayhoe with the 2017 Davida Teller Award

Mary Hayhoe

Professor of Psychology, Center for Perceptual Systems, University of Texas Austin

Vision in the context of natural behavior

Dr. Hayhoe will talk during the Awards Session
Monday, May 22, 2017, 12:30 – 1:30 pm, Talk Room 2

Investigation of vision in the context of ongoing behavior has contributed a number of insights by highlighting the importance of behavioral goals, and focusing attention on how vision and action play out in time. In this context, humans make continuous sequences of sensory-motor decisions to satisfy current goals, and the role of vision is to provide the relevant information for making good decisions in order to achieve those goals. I will review the factors that control gaze in natural behavior, including evidence for the role of the task, which defines the immediate goals, the rewards and costs associated with those goals, uncertainty about the state of the world, and prior knowledge.

Biography

Mary Hayhoe is an outstanding scientist who has made a number of highly innovative and important contributions to our understanding of visual sensation, perception and cognition. She received her PhD in 1980 from UC San Diego and served on the faculty at the University of Rochester (1984 – 2005) and University of Texas at Austin (2006 – present). Her scientific career began with a long series of fundamental and elegant studies on visual sensitivity, adaptation and color vision. During this period, Mary was a well‐funded and internationally‐recognized leader in these areas of research; indeed, her work in these areas is still having an important influence.

She then made a dramatic shift in fields, leaving retinal and color psychophysics entirely. With this change, Mary Hayhoe and her colleagues became pioneers in developing a new research area that examines behavior in semi-naturalistic situations. Her research is not about the perceptual or motor system in isolation, but how these systems work together to generate behavior. At the time (the early 1990’s), there had been very few attempts to understand visual and cognitive processing in natural visual tasks. Mary and her colleagues were really the first to develop research methods for rigorously studying visual memory, attention and eye movements in natural everyday tasks (making a sandwich, copying block patterns, walking in cluttered environments etc.). Prior to this work most scientists believed that little of fundamental or general importance could come from working with such complex tasks, because so many neural and motor mechanisms are involved, and because of the difficulty of exerting sufficient experimental control. However, Mary recognized and beautifully exploited the potential of eye, head and body tracking technology, and of virtual‐reality technology, for rigorously addressing the problem of understanding perceptual and cognitive processing in natural tasks.

Mary Hayhoe is one of the founders and acknowledged leaders of a new field where there is much deserved emphasis on behavior in the real world. Her care and imagination are always evident, providing an admirable standard for young men and women alike. Her former graduate students and post‐doctoral researchers readily acknowledge that her mentoring, investment in their futures, and friendship played an important role in their development as scientists and critical thinkers.

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The FoVea 2017 Award Recipients can be found here. 

Females of Vision et al. (FoVea) is excited to announce its inaugural round of the FoVea Travel and Networking Award, funded by National Science Foundation. Submissions are due on February 20, 2017.

The FoVea Travel and Networking Award is open to female members of the Vision Science Society (VSS) in pre-doctoral, post-doctoral, and pre-tenure faculty or research scientist positions. Up to 5 female vision scientists will be awarded $1,600 to cover costs involved in attending the 2017 VSS meeting, including membership fees, conference registration fees, and travel expenses.

FoVea created this award as part of its mission to advance the visibility, impact, and success of women in vision science. A recent report from Cooper and Radonjić (2016) indicated that in 2015, the ratio of women to men in VSS was near equal at the pre-doctoral level (1:1.13), but decreased as career stage increased. The decline is symptomatic of forces that impede the professional development of female vision scientists. A key aspect of professional development is building a professional network to support scientific pursuits and to provide mentorship at critical junctions in one’s academic career. The FoVea Travel and Networking Award will help female vision scientists build their professional network by encouraging them to meet with at least one Networking Target at the VSS meeting to discuss their research and consider potential for collaboration. The Networking Target(s) can be of any gender.

The goals of the FoVea Travel and Networking award are to:

1. Increase the visibility of women by giving them the opportunity to meet and have a one-on-one discussion with a senior scientist(s) at the meeting.
2. Increase the productivity of women by potentially stimulating collaborative research with the Networking Target(s).
3. Increase the networking skills of women, both those who apply for, and win the awards, and those who peruse the written reports of awardees on the FoVea website.
4. Allow excellent female vision scientists who might not otherwise be able to attend the conference to afford it.
5. Give awards that can be listed on female vision scientists’ CVs thereby enhancing their professional profile.

Application Instructions

Applicants are asked to email the following materials to Karen Schloss at by February 20, 2017. All application related emails should include “FoVea Award 2017” and the applicant’s name it the subject line. The CV, proposal, and letter of agreement from the Networking Target must be combined into a single PDF. The letter of recommendation should be sent in a separate email.

Application materials

1. CV
2. A proposal describing the applicant’s plan to network with at least one senior scientist during the VSS 2017 meeting (750 word limit). The plan should include an explanation for why the applicant chose this(these) particular Networking Target(s), a plan for what topics she will discuss with her Networking Target(s) during the meeting, and a statement of how she hopes forging a relationship with the Networking Target(s) will help advance her research/career agenda.
3. A letter of agreement from the senior scientist(s) named as the Networking Target(s). Networking Targets can be of any gender.
4. A letter of recommendation from the applicant’s advisor, research supervisor, or department head. Please include the applicant’s name in the subject line of the submission email.

Awardees will agree to write a report on their networking methods and outcomes after the conference by July 1^st, 2017. FoVea will post these reports on its website within 9 months of the conference.

Eligibility

Applicants must be a female vison scientist who is a graduate student, postdoctoral fellow, research scientist (non-tenure track), or junior faculty member (pre-tenure).

Review Process

Applications will be reviewed by a committee consisting of three members of the VSS community with Karen Schloss as Chair. Awards will be announced in mid March.

FoVea Committee: Diane Beck, Mary Peterson, Karen Schloss, and Allison Sekuler

VSS established the Davida Teller Award in 2013. Davida was an exceptional scientist, mentor and colleague, who for many years led the field of visual development. The award is therefore given to an outstanding woman vision scientist with a strong history of mentoring.

Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Dr. Eileen Kowler with the inaugural Davida Teller Award.

Eileen Kowler

Department of Psychology, Rutgers University

Dr. Eileen Kowler, Professor at Rutgers University, is the inaugural winner of the Davida Teller Award. Eileen transformed the field of eye movement research that eye movements are not reflexive visuomotor responses, but are driven by and tightly linked to attention, prediction, and cognition.

Perhaps the most significant scientific contribution by Eileen was the demonstration that saccadic eye movements and visual perception share attentional resources. This seminal paper has become the starting point for hundreds of subsequent studies about vision and eye movements. By convincingly demonstrating that the preparation of eye movements shares resources with the allocation of visual attention, this paper also established the validity of using eye movements as a powerful tool for investigating the mechanisms of visual attention and perception, which provides a precision and reliability that is otherwise difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. This work forms the basis of most of the work on eye movements that is presented at VSS every year!

Before her landmark studies on saccades and attention, Eileen made a major contribution by showing that cognitive expectations exert strong influences on smooth pursuit eye movements. At that time smooth pursuit eye movements were thought to be driven in a machine-like fashion by retinal error signals. Eileen’s wonderfully creative experiments (e.g., pursuit targets moving through Y-shaped tubes) convinced the field that smooth pursuit is guided in part by higher-level visual processes related to expectations, memory, and cognition.

Anticipatory behavior of human eye movements

Monday, May 13, 2013, 1:00 pm, Royal Palm Ballroom

The planning and control of eye movements is one of the most important tasks accomplished by the brain because of the close connection between eye movements and visual function.    Classical approaches assumed that eye movements are solely or primarily reactions to one or another type of sensory cue, but we now know that eye movements also display anticipatory responses to predicted signals or events.  This talk will illustrate several examples of anticipatory behavior of both smooth pursuit eye movements and saccades.   These anticipatory responses are automatic and effortless, depend on the decoding of symbolic environmental cues and on memory for recent events, and can be found in typical individuals and in those with autism spectrum disorder.   Anticipatory responses show that oculomotor control is driven by internal models that take into account both the capacity limits of the motor system and the states of the surrounding visual environment.

The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Horace Barlow with the 2016 Ken Nakayama Medal for Excellence in Vision Science.

The Ken Nakayama Medal is in honor of Professor Ken Nakayama’s contributions to the Vision Sciences Society, as well as his innovations and excellence to the domain of vision sciences.

The winner of the Ken Nakayama Medal receives this honor for high-impact work that has made a lasting contribution in vision science in the broadest sense. The nature of this work can be fundamental, clinical or applied. The Medal is not a lifetime career award and is open to all career stages.

The medal will be presented during the VSS Awards session on Monday, May 16, 2016, 12:30 pm in Talk Room 2.

Horace Barlow Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge Perhaps more than any other vision scientist, Horace Barlow has shaped the way we think about how seeing depends on the underlying machinery of vision. His articulation of the single neuron doctrine—that the activity of a single neuron is significant for seeing—and the corollary idea that the visual stimuli to which a neuron is most sensitive tell us about the neuron’s perceptual role, are now taken so much for granted that it is hard to appreciate how primitive were notions of the relationship between visual physiology and perception before him. His unfailing concentration on the act of seeing drove his efforts to use psychophysical and physiological insight to drive experimental measurement, and brought a clarity and incisiveness that was unlike anything that preceded it. The approaches he pioneered provide the foundation for much of contemporary visual neuroscience.

An important conceptual theme that runs through his career is information. In early work, this was evident in his rigorous application of statistical theory to understanding psychophysical and physiological thresholds. Later he applied it to higher-level perceptual decisions such as pattern recognition, symmetry perception, and perception of random dot motion. The interplay of information and efficiency underlies his work in encoding and entropy, and forms the basis of many of his theoretical contributions, notably his work on redundancy reduction and efficient coding. Information theory is now a standard part of the tool set of vision science, but it was Barlow who brought it to vision science and taught us to use it. His profound influence on the way we think about vision should not overshadow the importance of his particular contributions, including: characterizing the nature of eye movements during fixation; establishing the quantum efficiency of vision both psychophysically and physiologically; learning the spatio-temporal organization of visual adaptation; discovering and deducing the behavioral significance of retinal ganglion cells with highly specific response properties; elucidating directional movement selectivity in retina; analyzing binocular disparity selectivity in cortex; and many more. Barlow trained in medicine at Harvard and University College Hospital before his graduate studies with E D Adrian in Cambridge. He held faculty positions at Cambridge and at the University of California, Berkeley. He has received many honors, among them elected Fellowship, the Ferrier Lectureship, and the Royal Medal of the Royal Society of London, the Australia Prize, the Tillyer Award of the Optical Society of America, the Karl Spencer Lashley Prize of the American Philosophical Society, and the Swartz Prize of the Society for Neuroscience. Barlow feels happiest, and proudest, about having worked in a community of scientists who are leaping towards a deeper understanding of the relation between brain and mind.  This goal once seemed utterly unreachable, and was openly mocked until quite recently. And in the end what he feels most grateful for is his own long association with Trinity College, where he learned the importance of arguing fiercely for strongly held beliefs.

Nicholas Turk-Browne Associate Professor, Associate Chair, Department of Psychology, Princeton University Nicholas Turk-Browne is the 2016 winner of the Elsevier/VSS Young Investigator Award. Trained at the University of Toronto and then at Yale University, Nicholas Turk-Browne was awarded a PhD in Cognitive Psychology in 2009 under the supervision of Marvin Chun and Brian Scholl. Following his PhD, Nick took up a position at Princeton University, where he is currently an associate professor.

In the past 7 years following his PhD, Nick has established an active and dynamic lab that uses multidisciplinary methodologies to advance our understanding of the neural circuits that mediate visual cognition. Nick combines behavior, brain imaging, and computational modeling to bridge across key areas in the field of visual cognition: visual learning, memory and attention. His pioneering work on visual statistical learning has demonstrated that our ability to extract perceptual regularities relies on interactions between the hippocampus and the visual cortex. Nick has shown that this circuit supports predictive representations based on implicitly learned associations. Further, his work shows that — although implicit — statistical learning can be modulated by task demands and, in turn, learned regularities automatically draw attention. Nick’s contributions extend to groundbreaking methodological developments that combine neuroimaging and machine learning to understand the brain dynamics that support visual cognition. Finally, Nick’s recent work using neural fluctuations as feedback during real-time fMRI to train attention has strong potential for translational clinical applications.  Elsevier/Vision Research Article Attention and perception in memory systems Monday, May  16, 12:30 pm, Talk Room 2 The labeling of brain structures by function, such as the “visual” system, “attention” networks, and “memory” systems, reinforces an appealing division of cognitive labor over the brain. At the same time, neural representations can be widely distributed and real-world behaviors require the coordination of much of the brain. An alternative way to think about brain function is in terms of the computations that different brain regions and networks perform and to try to understand when and how these computations participate in different cognitive processes. In this presentation, I will discuss some recent findings from my lab that illustrate this perspective, particularly about the involvement of memory systems in attention and perception. First, I will show that goal-directed attention modulates the state of the hippocampus — the canonical memory system in the brain — and through this, determines what aspects of visual experience we remember. Second, I will show that pattern completion, a core computation of the hippocampus, supports predictive coding in early visual cortex. These and other studies highlight the broad reach of vision science in the mind and brain.

VSS established the Davida Teller Award in 2013. Davida was an exceptional scientist, mentor and colleague, who for many years led the field of visual development. The award is therefore given to an outstanding woman vision scientist with a strong history of mentoring.

Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Dr. Janette Atkinson with the 2016 Davida Teller Award.

Janette Atkinson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London
Visiting Professor, University of Oxford
Visual Development Unit, London and Oxford

Janette Atkinson is a worldwide leader in research on human visual development. She has made major advances in an extraordinarily wide range of basic and clinical areas, collaborating throughout her career, with vision scientists, ophthalmologists, optometrists and pediatric neurologists. Her impact on the field has been immense, both directly through innovative research, and indirectly through her mentorship and personal support to her students and collaborators.

Her career began in Cambridge University where she set up and led one of the first ‘baby labs’, the Visual Development Unit at Cambridge and subsequently at University College London (UCL, University of London) and Oxford. She was the first to use Davida Teller’s method of forced-choice preferential looking to measure contrast sensitivity, initially in the first months of life of her own child (Nature 1974), and subsequently with novel VEP measures in newborns. Using newly devised behavioral and VEP/ERP methods, she demonstrated the onset of binocularity, orientation sensitivity, OKN, and fixation shift control of attention, leading to her pioneering neural model of cortical/subcortical interaction in early human development. Janette originated the use of photorefraction and videorefraction with infants, and led two unique population screening studies showing that spectacle correction of infants’ refractive errors could improve visual outcome, reducing strabismus and amblyopia by 4 years of age. Having used her methods of assessing cortical development with at-risk groups, particularly infants born preterm and children with Williams syndrome, she has moved on to studying global processing, leading to her influential idea of ‘Dorsal Stream Vulnerability’ in many children with genetic developmental disorders, perinatal brain injury and CVI (Cerebral Visual Impairment). She argues for the continuity and associations in dorsal stream development between global motion and attentional, spatial, visuo-cognitive, and visuomotor development, and has devised assessments for this whole area in both typical and atypically developing children.

She has been a mentor and advisor, giving generous support to many students, colleagues and collaborators, both scientists and clinicians, and a role model showing young female scientists that the highest levels can be reached while sustaining close family life with her four children. More widely, she has been a tireless advocate for women’s scientific careers, as a member of ARVO’s Equality and Diversity Committee and through the UK’s Athena SWAN scheme for advancing women’s careers in science. She led UCL’s successful bid for a SWAN Charter Award, one of the first 12 UK universities to achieve this award.

In recognition of her internationally acclaimed research record, she has been elected as a Fellow of the British Academy, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Academia Europaea.

Visual science as a key to typical and atypical development

Monday, May 16, 2016, 12:30 – 1:30 pm, Talk Room 2

My research on vision development has always been inspired by the prospect of understanding and helping the development of vision in infants and children with clinical problems, including developmental disorders such as autism, Downs syndrome and cerebral palsy.  Initial advances in the basic science of human visual development, since the first measurements of infants’ acuity and contrast sensitivity, have led directly into applications for identifying and assessing  paediatric  ophthalmological and neurodevelopmental  visual disorders.

I will briefly review a few diverse highlights of our own translational work in the Visual Development Unit, and suggest unanswered questions arising from our current knowledge:

• Indicators of the onset of visual cortical function, based on our model of cortical/subcortical interactions, allowed us to identify  infants with perinatal brain injury (some with very preterm birth) resulting in CVI (Cerebral Visual Impairment ) and  predict subsequent neurocognitive outcome.
• Measurements of infants’ accommodation and refraction using photorefractive instruments designed in the VDU,   made it possible to carry out population screening programmes of  8000+ typically developing  9- month old infants identifying those  at risk of strabismus and amblyopia.  We demonstrated that early spectacle correction of infants with significant hyperopic refractive errors could reduce the number of children who develop these common disorders.
• Tests of children’s global form and motion processing in  extra-striate visual  areas identified ‘dorsal stream vulnerability’ as a feature of many diverse neurodevelopmental disorders e.g. Williams syndrome, autism , hemiplegia. Recently we have found that global motion sensitivity is associated with MRI surface area structural measures in parietal lobe in typically developing children. Good motion sensitivity is correlated with good visuo-motor ability and good early mathematical ability.   Poor global motion sensitivity, relative to static form sensitivity, in children with developmental disorders, is associated with spatial, visuo-motor and attention deficits.
• Child-friendly tests of visual attention (the Early Child Attention Battery devised in the VDU)   enable an individual child’s attention  profile of abilities across different components of attention,   to be measured rapidly  in both typically developing preschool children and in children with genetic developmental disorders  with low mental age.

My research has started to answer questions about both the typical and atypical developing visual brain, but it has raised many more unanswered ones. For example , we still do not know the critical period of plasticity for many of the visual networks which develop in the first few years of life. If we understood the epigenetic factors controlling early visual brain growth and plasticity, then this might lead to success in future treatment of paediatric visual disorders.  My hope is that some of these questions will be answered by future vision researchers (both women and men !) coming into the ‘developmental arena’ from a wide range of different disciplines.