Primary tabs

Our research interests include brain plasticity in sensory processing associated with amblyopia (lazy eye) and strabismus (misaligned eyes). We also study visual development of infants and children in clinical populations.
Tabs







Verghese Lab
Our laboratory studies the mechanisms of healthy vision and action, as well as the basis of attention and visual adaptation in clinical populations.
Multisensory Interactions Between the Primary Sensory Cortices
Under construction!

The Role of Selective Visual Attention in Amblyopic Suppression
Individuals with strabismus are confronted with double vision, their brain has to choose to attend to one image and ignore or suppress the other. It has been commonly suggested that a constant suppression on the non-preferred eye in strabismus is responsible for the development of amblyopia. In the current project, we study the role of top-influences of attention in amblyopic suppression and test the hypothesis that visual suppression in amblyopia may be a form of long-term attentional “neglect”.
Alleviating interocular suppression by high-attention demand training in amblyopia
The goal of this project is to test a hypothesis that whether or not training patients to pay more attention to the input from the amblyopic eye can overcome interocular suppression to treat amblyopia.
Fellow Eye Deficits in Strabismic Amblyopia
Fellow eye abnormalities have been reported in a number of psychophysical and VEP studies. The goal of this project is to characterize the fellow eye deficits.
Grouping and Perception in Different Types of Amblyopia
This project was to measure the neural correlates of grouping and perception in different types of amblyopia. We found that strabismus generates significant abnormalities at both early and later stages of cortical processing and, importantly, that these abnormalities are independent of visual-acuity deficits

Neonatal Jaundice and Vision Loss
High concentrations of unconjugated bilirubin are neurotoxic and cause brain damage in newborn infants. However, the exact level of bilirubin that may be neurotoxic in a given infant is unknown.

Visual Cortical Function in Very Low Birth Weight Infants
Preterm infants are at high risk of visual and neural developmental deficits. We used swept parameter visual evoked potential (sVEP) to determine whether premature birth alters visual cortical function.