Abstract - During walking, people use vision to both create movement plans about future steps and correct the execution of the current step. However, the importance of these types of visual information changes based on the movement ability of the person and the difficulty of the terrain. In this talk, I will present the results from two experiments that explore how visual sampling strategies and visual reliance changes with locomotor learning. The first characterizes how visual sampling strategies change as people practice a treadmill-based target stepping task. The second examines how visual reliance changes during the same target stepping task by altering what visual information is available at different points of the locomotor learning process. I will conclude by presenting some preliminary results of these techniques applied to a clinical population, specifically individuals with a concussion. People with a concussion typically exhibit both oculomotor deficits (which would impact what visual information is available) and gait deficits (which often persist beyond the point of recovery when symptoms have returned to baseline). My current work, therefore, proposes that there may be lingering changes to an individual’s gaze behavior which may be causing these persistent gait deficits. https://www.alexcates.com/

Improving Zoom accessibility for people with hearing impairments People with hearing impairments often use lipreading and speechreading to improve speech comprehension. This approach is helpful but only works if the speaker’s face and mouth are clearly visible. For the benefit of people with hearing impairments on Zoom calls, please enable your device’s camera whenever you are speaking on Zoom, and face the camera while you speak. (Feel free to disable your camera when you aren’t speaking.)

Abstract - Attention to low-level visual features can alter the activity of neurons in visual cortex. In principle we expect attention to select the neurons most sensitive to changes in the feature being attended. This means that the precise nature of the neuronal responses may depend on both task and stimulus. Here, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine modulations of neural activity in visual cortex driven purely by both stimulus and task. We presented sequences of achromatic radial frequency pattern targets (200ms, ISI randomized from 1800-2000ms) with occasional small ‘probe’ changes in their contrast, shape and orientation. Probe types were randomized and independent and subjects were cued to attend to specific probe types in blocks of 24s. Responses from 15 subjects (9 F) were recorded in separate fMRI and MEG experiments. Support vector machines were used to decode MEG sensor space data at 5ms intervals and fMRI voxel-wise responses from retinotopically-defined regions of interest. We show that both attentional state and target events cause changes in ongoing neuronal activity and that we are able to distinguish between different types of low-level featural attention with good temporal and spatial resolution. Some of his most cited vision research and neuroimaging papers https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=uXek5k4AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

Improving Zoom accessibility for people with hearing impairments People with hearing impairments often use lipreading and speechreading to improve speech comprehension. This approach is helpful but only works if the speaker’s face and mouth are clearly visible. For the benefit of people with hearing impairments on Zoom calls, please enable your device’s camera whenever you are speaking on Zoom, and face the camera while you speak. (Feel free to disable your camera when you aren’t speaking.)