This award provides funds to The Infant Study Center and Visual Research Lab in the Psychology Department at Brooklyn College to continue a successful REU-Site which offers students a research experience which focuses on many aspects of the visual system. Together with a colleague from Medgar-Evers College of CUNY, mentors will constitute a REU-Site aimed at students who might be persuaded by their research experience to continue to the doctorate in Experimental and Developmental Psychology, and related areas in the Neurosciences. Both institutions have many women and minority students as well as special programs to attract and guide such students; heavy emphasis will be placed on recruiting among them. The training program includes laboratory seminars, an active role in a specific research "team", and public presentations of results. The research areas, which are all heavily computerized and instrumented, include: (1) Development of infants' abilities to focus their eyes on objects around them (i.e., mechanisms of accommodation and convergence); methods will include quantitative photorefraction. (2) 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. (3) Color vision, particularly the use of scaling techniques to specify color appearance under a variety of viewing conditions, such as changes in retinal position; results will be related to known variations in anatomy and physiology across the retina. This award contributes to the Foundation's continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences.
