This award provides funds to The Infant Study Center and Visual Research Lab in the Psychology Department at Brooklyn College to establish an REU-Site which will offer students a research experience which focuses on areas in Experimental and Developmental Psychology, and related areas in the Neurosciences. Together with a colleague from Medgar-Evers College of CUNY, mentors will provide training on many aspects of the visual system. The training program includes laboratory seminars, an active role in a specific research "team", and public presentations of results. The research areas are all heavily computerized and instrumented: (i) Development of infants' abilities to focus their eyes on objects around them (i.e., mechanisms of accommodation and convergence); methods will include quantitative photorefraction. (ii) Brain mechanisms associated with vision. Visual evoked potentials will be recorded to examine the maturation of physiological systems, especially those involving the lateral interactions that are so important for object recognition. (iii) Color vision, particularly the use of scaling techniques to specify color appearance under a variety of viewing conditions, such as changes in retinal positions; results will be related to known variations in anatomy and physiology across the retina.
