Jennifer Steeves

Associate Professor

Department of Psychology

Centre for Vision Research

York University

In broad strokes, I am interested in brain plasticity. How does the brain adapt to changes in sensory input or to direct brain damage? In my lab, we use converging techniques to study the brain and behaviour including psychophysics, eye movement measurement, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). We study rare neurological patients with specific brain damage resulting in visual object agnosia (the inability to recognize objects) or prosopagnosia (the inability to recognize a face). We also study unique ophthalmological patients who have had one eye surgically removed early in life, thereby disrupting binocular input to the visual system. We are examining low-level form vision and motion processing as well as higher-level face and scene processing. We also study cross-sensory adaptation of auditory perception in these clinical vision groups. This approach can reveal coding mechanisms in the brain that inform us about how intact sensory systems function.