Visual Development Lab

February 2013

• Daphne Maurer presents pediatric ophthalmology rounds at The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, on learning to see faces.
• Daphne Maurer presents a talk at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on the plasticity of the visual brain in adults.

January 2013

• Daphne Maurer gives a talk at Stanford on critical periods re-examined.

October 2012

• Adélaïde de Heering publishes a paper in Perception showing that adults extend holistic processing to unnatural faces.

September 2012

• Ferrinne Spector publishes a paper in Seeing & Perceiving on colour and texture associations to odours.

August 2012

• Simon Jeon publishes a paper in Seeing and Perceiving on the efficacy of video games in improving the vision of adults with amblyopia.

July 2012

• Yi-Chuan Chen joins the lab as a post-doctoral fellow to study the development of multisensory perception.
• Terri Lewis and Daphne Maurer present papers at the meeting of the Canadian Amblyopia Network.

June 2012

• The BrainCPR network holds its eighth meeting in Canoe Bay, Wisconsin.
• Daphne Maurer becomes President of the International Society for Infant Studies.
• At the meeting of the International Society for Infant Studies Daphne Maurer presents papers on visual critical periods and on sound symbolism, and is the discussant for a symposium on shape perception.
• Daphne Maurer presents a paper in the festspiel to honour Herb Pick in Minneapolis.

May 2012

• Mark Vida, Ana Bracovic, Adélaïde de Heering, and Simon Jeon present posters at the meeting of the Vision Science Society on developmental changes in sensitivity to contrast and to direction of gaze and on the effects of starting pre-school and of training on the ability to recognize upright and inverted faces.
• Mark Vida publishes a paper in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology on the refinement of sensitivity to eye contact during middle childhood.
• Terri Lewis gives the annual invited public lecture sponsored by the Vision Sciences Society and Florida Gulf Coast University on what babies can see. At the meeting of the Vision Sciences Society she also presents a paper on the development of motion perception, and she is invited to speak at the "Stuart Anstis Mid Career Intervention," a day of talks honouring the accomplishments of Dr. Stuart Anstis.
• Terri Lewis is the keynote speaker delivering the 31st McCulloch Lecture at the University of Toronto on visual development and critical periods revisited.
• Daphne Maurer presents a paper on perceptual development at the workshop on Perceptual Learning and Recognition of the multi-centre Network for Sensory Research.

April 2012

• Bat-sheva Hadad publishes a paper in Developmental Science on the surprising sparing of sensitivity to biological motion after early visual deprivation.
• Terri Lewis presents rounds to neuro-opthalmologily residents and fellows on higher order deficits after treatment for congenital cataract.
• Daphne Maurer edits a special issue of Developmental Psychobiology on recent lessons from stroke recovery and their implications for understanding the plasticity of the adult brain and possible treatments for amblyopia. In this she publishes an introductory paper about amblyopia.

March 2012

• Larissa Vingillis-Jaremko and Laura Gibson present posters at the meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society on the children's immature judgments of attractiveness and the early tendency to think of sequences as running from left to right, even before they learn to read.
• Rachel Robbins publishes a paper in Developmental Science on the slow tuning of face processing to upright faces during development and the damage to that process by early cataracts that block visual input.

February 2012

• Daphne Maurer presents a paper at the meeting of the American Association for Advancement of Science on the perceptual deficits caused by early visual deprivation from cataracts but the remaining plasticity in adulthood to ameliorate the deficits by video game training. The paper receives world-wide coverage in the press.
• Mark Vida publishes a paper in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology on children's emerging sensitivity to where someone else is looking.

January 2012

• Adélaïde de Heering publishes a paper in Cognitive Development showing that between ages 6 and 12 children become increasingly adept at recognizing uptight faces with little improvement for inverted faces.

November 2011

• Simon Jeon takes up a faculty position in the Department of Vision Sciences at Glasgow Caledonian University.
• Bat-sheva Hadad publishes a paper in Developmental Science on the development of children's sensitivity to motion.
• Terri Lewis presents a poster at the meeting of the Society for Neuroscience on video game training as a treatment for amblyopia.

October 2011

• Daphne Maurer presents a paper at the meeting of the American Synesthesia Association on sound symbolism, and becomes a member of the Board of Directors.

September 2011

• Ana Bracovic joins the lab as a graduate student working on developmental changes in the ability to learn to distinguish monkey faces.

August 2011

• Mohini Patel successfully defends her M.Sc. thesis on the perception of partly occluded objects.
• Vicki Armstrong publishes a paper in i-Perception on the development of sensitivity to motion during infancy.

July 2011

• Adélaïde de Heering wins a 3-year fellowship from the Belgian Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique .
• Simon Jeon accepts a post as Lecturer in Vision Science at Glasgow Caledonian University.
• Daphne Maurer speaks about sound symbolism in toddlers at the meeting of International Association for the Study of Child Language in Montreal.
• Daphne Maurer is named Associate Investigator of The Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders.

June 2011

• Mayu Nishimura publishes a paper in Vision Research showing that identity aftereffects vary with adaptor time in the same way in 8-year-olds and adults.
• At the York University Conference on Plastic Vision, Larissa Vingilis-Jaremko, Adélaïde de Heering, Mohini Patel, Simon Jeon, and Mark Vida present posters, and Daphne Maurer presents a talk about human visual critical periods.
• The BrainCPR network holds its seventh meeting in Montreal.
• Daphne Maurer is named Distinguished University Professor.

May 2011

• Lisa Betts, Simon Jeon, Larissa Vingillis-Jaremko, Mark Vida, and Mohini Patel present posters at the annual meeting of the Vision Sciences Society.
• Ferrinne Spector publishes a paper in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance on colour associations to letters.

April 2011

• Adélaïde; de Heering presents a poster at the meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society on adults' ability to learn to distinguish inverted faces after training.
• Xiaoqing Gao publishes a paper in Vision Research on the spatial frequency tuning of sensitivity to facial identity versus facial expressions.
• Rachel Robbins publishes a paper in Journal of Experimental Child Psychology on developmental changes in sensitivity to feature spacing in houses.
• Daphne Maurer presents colloquia at the University of Minnesota on visual plasticity and on synaesthesia.

March 2011

• Mohini Patel wins the prize for the best oral presentation given at the Ontario-wide conference held at McMaster, "Current Research in Engineering, Science, & Technology."
• Adélaïde; de Heering and Mark Vida present posters at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development on the development of sensitivity to facial identity and to eye gaze.
• Daphne Maurer presents talks at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development as part of symposia on Sound Symbolism and on Critical Periods Re-examined.

January 2011

• Daphne Maurer gives a colloquim at Cornell University on how synesthesia can provide clues about the development of perception and even language.

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