Canada Research Chair in Human Vision and Eye Movement
Jason Barton, a Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences, studies higher-level visual processing and cognitive control of eye movements, much of it involving face processing and patients with prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces. He has used structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging to establish correlations between the brain network and patterns of deficits. Currently he is translating the knowledge gained from these studies to the design of rehabilitative programs based on principles of perceptual learning. New work in his laboratory has also moved to studying another important expert perceptual function in humans, the visual perception of words in the reading process. This work has also been applied to studying the plasticity of the reading process, to determine the most effective ways of improving reading in patients with hemianopic dyslexia.