Congratulations to Ione Fine and Geoffrey Boynton, who received a five-year, $1,880,561 award from the NIH National Eye Institute!
The award begins May 1 and is titled "Learning to See Again: Biological Constraints on Cortical Plasticity and the Implications for Sight Restoration Technologies."
This project will involve normally sighted participants, viewing distorted visual input, as ‘virtual patients’ to learn which spatiotemporal distortions can be compensated for by plasticity, and which must be compensated for in device design. This will provide device manufacturers with a more nuanced understanding of the abilities and limits of visual perceptual adaptability. This work will provide novel insights regarding the fundamental mechanisms of cortical plasticity by asking whether, in adulthood, it is possible to reconfigure the fundamental building blocks of visual perception.