Smith-Kettlewell Brain Imaging Center

This project focuses on the emerging area of the neuroscience of art learning. It addresses the important issue of how the brain learns complex skills, specifically the process of drawing, through two different sensory modalities. Visual art, and drawing in particular, engages an orchestrated system of cognitive elements extending beyond mere visual perception. This brain system involves an array of cross-cognitive interactions for advanced learning in diverse sensory environments. However, there is a lack of systematic studies of the neural mechanisms of learning in visual art, or of the…

Recent studies have established that a high proportion of patients diagnosed with mild (or diffuse) traumatic brain injury (mTBI) exhibit binocular vision dysfunctions, particularly, deficiencies in the binocular coordination of eye movements.

The multidisciplinary goal was to develop an integrated conceptualization of the mid-level encoding of 3D object structure from multiple surface cues

This project is designed to advance the integration of high field fMRI in alert macaque monkeys with “informed” neurophysiology, and to apply it in addressing a long-standing research question regarding the neural processing of stereoscopic 3-D motion.

We propose a multidisciplinary approach to effective spatiomotor rehabilitation in blindness and visual impairment. For those who have lost vision, the eye-hand coordination normally available for the manipulation of objects for everyday activities is unavailable and has to be replaced by information from other senses

The binocular coordination of movements of the eyes is a complex issue controlled by many brainstem nuclei, and is subject to a wide variety of forms of disruption by traumatic brain injury and oculomotor muscles disorders. The goal of this project is to characterize the natural range of the dynamics of the binocular ocuomotor system and their widespread disruptions across the spectrum of human ocolumotor control.