PAD Seminar, Dr Tessa Dekker
Mechanisms for optimising perception and action in development.
Visually-guided abilities that are key for safe everyday task performance such as object recognition, discrimination, and avoidance, undergo substantial development until late in childhood. Classically, research investigating this development has focussed on improvements in sensitivity of early visual and motor channels. However, in recent years, decision-theoretic approaches have formalised how changes in visually guided performance could also result from more efficient use of available information, for example by optimising decision rules, cost functions, and priors. I will present a series of studies that use such quantitative frameworks, neuroimaging, and psychophysics approaches to untangle how different low- and high-level factors contribute to the development and improvement of visual behaviours in childhood. Together, these studies suggest that more effective use of information plays a larger role in children's performance than previously appreciated, and that modelling this role is needed to gain computational-level insight in the key drivers of adaptive vision. If time, I will present recent applications of this approach to test mechanisms of visual improvement after gene therapy treatments of eye disease.
Bio
I am interested in how our genes, brain, and experiences interact to shape how we perceive and act on the world in normal development and eye disease. To address these questions, I take a multi-method approach that combines behavioural psychophysics and Neuroimaging with model-based analyses. After obtaining a degree in cognitive science from the University of Amsterdam, I did my PhD at Birkbeck with Mark Johnson, Marty Sereno, and Denis Mareschal, followed by a postdoc with Marko Nardini at the UCL Institute of Opthalmology. I then obtained an ESRC Early Career Future Leaders Fellowship, followed by a Moorfields Eye Charity Career Development Award. Currently I work as Associate Professor across the UCL institute of Ophthalmology and Experimental Psychology, PaLS, where I lead the UCL Child Vision Lab.
To register for this event, see link above.
