Projects

Human Echolocation

What is echolocation? Sometimes, the surrounding world is too dark and silent for typical vision and hearing. This is true in deep caves, for example, or in murky water where little light penetrates. Animals living in these environments often have the ability to echolocate: They make sounds and listen for their reflections. Like turning on a flashlight in a dark room, echolocation is a way to illuminate objects and spaces actively using sound.

Upper Depth Limit Across Visual Field

Stereopsis is important for tasks of daily living such as eye-hand coordination. It is best in central vision but is also mediated by the periphery. Previously we have shown that individuals with central-field loss who have residual stereopsis in the periphery perform better at an eye-hand-coordination task. Here we sought to determine what sets the limit of stereopsis, defined as the largest disparity that supports the sustained appearance of depth, in the near periphery in healthy individuals.

The Kinematics of Braille Reading

[Under construction]

When blind persons read braille, a system of raised dots for tactile reading and writing, how is the information processed? How do a few indentations on the fingerpads translate to linguistic information, and how does the text, in turn, influence the motions of the hands reading it? Our work on braille addresses these processes on several levels.

 

t-Scratch: Tangible Programming Environment

tScratch: Tangible Programming Environment Targeted for Students who are Blind or Visually Impaired

Introductory programming languages are overwhelmingly designed with sighted students in mind. Our goal is to expand and enhance scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/), a block-based visual programming language and online community targeted primarily at children with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) concepts. The addition of tactile programming tiles, a specialized haptic coding grid, and an auditory interface will provide beginning programming instruction for students either as individual…

Neurodynamics of Braille Reading

[Under construction]

Neuroimaging techniques such as EEG/MEG and fMRI offer the potential to trace the propagation of Braille information through the brain as it transforms from a dot pattern to meaningful alphabetic information, and comparing this to the analogous processing stream of printed letters in sighted people.

Advanced Spatiomotor Rehabilitation for Navigation in Blindness & Visual Impairment

Successful navigation requires the development of an accurate and flexible mental, or cognitive, map of the navigational space and of the route trajectory required to travel from the current to the target location. The Cognitive-Kinesthetic (C-K) Rehabilitation Training that we have developed in the preceding period utilizes a unique form of blind memory-guided drawing to develop cognitive mapping to a high level of proficiency.

Harnessing the Power of Drawing for the Enhancement of Learning across Levels of Vision Function

Recent scientific findings about art and drawing suggest that drawing can facilitate learning in a wide variety of domains. The proposed collaboration will develop an interdisciplinary research program aimed at harnessing the power of drawing to enhance learning across fields of intellectual endeavor.