Vision & Sight Recovery

Presentation of research activities

What makes us perceive and interact with our visual environment the way we do?

This seemingly simple question is, in fact, far from trivial. The simple act of viewing an image can sometimes yield vastly different perceptual interpretations among individuals, even within the same person across different moments in time. The nature of this variability has puzzled researchers and scholars for centuries and remains one of the key problems of vision and cognitive science. In our research, we focus on multiple factors that might contribute to this variability. These include an individual’s prior experiences, the influence of temporal and spatial context, and the intrinsic dynamics of neural activity patterns. These factors may interact in ways that are highly specific to each individual, much like fingerprints, and can vary drastically, particularly in clinical conditions. Our goal is to understand how these factors interact in shaping our moment-to-moment visual abilities, beyond what meets the eye.

To this aim, our research follows two main axes:

1. Understanding the role of spatial and temporal context in visual perception.
2. Characterizing the relationship between inter- and intra-individual variability in visual performance and temporal dynamics of neural activity patterns.

Within these frameworks, we use a multidisciplinary approach, integrating studies of human behavior (psychophysics), neural activity (EEG, fMRI, brain connectivity), and computational/brain network modeling. Our research encompasses various topics, from visual perception, attention, and memory, to spatial and temporal processing, brain rhythms, and networks. Our overarching focus is on explaining variability in perceptual performance within and across individuals, including clinical populations.