Depending on the environment or postural constraint, sensory modalities may be more or less reliable and the brain therefore assigns an appropriate weight to each signal. Individual differences as well as age and pathology lead to a differential weighting of sensory information, which in turn affects how the world is perceived and how the body is controlled.
I am a postdoctoral fellow, interested in how humans interact with their environment and have been studying how visual perception and postural control are linked. In my previous work I examined the effect of differential sensory reweighting and visual sampling on locomotion and spatial cognition across the adult lifespan.
My work at Smith-Kettlewell focuses on how central field loss due to Age-related Macular Degeneration affects older adults’ weighting of different sensory information for spatial orientation perception and postural control. My position is funded by the Rachel C. Atkinson endowment and, more specifically, I will examine visual-vestibular interactions for perception and locomotor tasks under the mentorship of Dr. Natela Shanidze.