Congratulations to Ron Bivens and Bianca Baltaretu who are this year’s Vision and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab Participant Award Recipients, in the categories of older and younger participants, respectively.

This award is given annually to the younger and the older participant who contributes the most to our lab as a research participant in terms of number of hours spent in the lab and level of commitment to helping us collect our data. Ron and Bianca have each participated in over 25 studies within our lab and have gone out of their way to ensure that our data collection meets all our deadlines and is done with care and dedication.

This year’s senior participant award is especially meaningful as it has now been renamed The George Krausz Memorial Senior Participant Award, named in memory of one of our very dedicated and beloved seniors who unfortunately passed away on April 14, 2011.  George participated in over 35 of our studies and also was in the local newspaper and on television as our senior representative when our publications received publicity in the news. George participated in studies conducted in our lab for over 8 years.

George Krausz wrote this note after having received the award in July, 2005:  As the passage of time attempts to manifest itself upon my 68 years, I am putting up a valiant fight in order to stay young. At least in mind. I challenge myself by volunteering at Mac and wouldn’t admit to aging if it killed me. Professors Sekuler and Bennett’s Vision lab offered me a challange to prove to myself that I can still cut it. Those experiments in the lab turned out to be not only challanging but an enormous boost to my self esteem. I participated in the CH TV news clip with enthusiasm until the on-screen reporter implied that I was elderly. Oh, well, compared to her…My thanks to the Lab and the people there for enabling me to participate in those very interesting experiments.I am looking forward to future challenges at theVision Lab. Now if they could just set those experiments to some swinging music or something…Just a thought.

Any senior who receives this award is chosen carefully as they carry on the hopes and dreams of George Krausz who was passionate about our research and wanted to make a difference in the field of Vision and Aging for the sake of others.  Congratulations to Ron and Bianca!

VCNLab research is back in the news. As we age, the common electrophysiological marker of face perception, the N170, becomes less specific for the presence of faces, and is significantly delayed compared to the latency found in younger people. Although behavioural measures of face perception were tightly linked to the N170 in younger observers, the behavioural and brain measures were not related in older observers, suggesting shifts in the way the brain processes faces as we age.

GA Rousselet, JS Husk, CR Pernet, CM Gaspar, PJ Bennett & AB Sekuler (2009) Age-related delay in information accrual for faces: Evidence from a parametric, single-trial EEG approach. BMC Neuroscience.

Congrats to Guillaume on another highly accessed article!

Congrats to our newest PhDs: Zahra Hussain and Jesse Husk; Zahra is starting a postdoc at Nottingham, and Jesse at McGill. Ryan Kealey is our newest Master of Science; he’s starting in the PhD program in Engineering at the University of Toronto, doing HCI. Former PDF Alexa Roggeveen has moved on to bigger and better things, including puff pastry – we expect samples. Lindsay Farber was recently promoted to the PhD program in Neuroscience; Yaro Konar and Eugenie Roudaia passed their PhD comps; and we welcome Matt Pachai to the lab as our newest graduate student. The desks have been shuffled!!

Congratulations to VCNLab alum, Guillaume Rousselet, on the designation of his new BioMed Central article as “Highly Accessed.” From the BMC website: “The ‘Highly accessed’ graphic appears on journal table of contents and search results to identify those articles that have been especially highly accessed, relative to their age, and the journal in which they were published.” To see what the fuss is all about, access it yourself!
.
GA Rousselet, CR Pernet, PJ Bennett & AB Sekuler (2008) Parametric study of EEG sensitivity to phase noise in face processing. BMC Neuroscience, 9:98

Pat Bennett, VCNLab Co-Director gave a joint PNB-Neuroscience lecture on Face Perception last Thursday at McMaster University. Not to be outdone, Stan Govenlock, VCNLab 2nd year PhD student, will be presenting his work on aging and neural tuning at the upcoming Perception-Cognition Seminar, Friday at 3 pm (PC335). Reception to follow in the lounge at 4, then on to Trick-or-Treating!

Pat Bennett, co-VCNLab Director, will be presenting a joint PNB-McMaster Neuroscience Graduate Program lecture on “Identifying Human Faces.”
October 23, 3 pm in PC155 (Psychology Building at McMaster University).

Everyone is welcome to attend, and a wine and cheese reception will follow the talk (PC 205)

On October 22, 1850, Gustav-Theodor Fechner initially conceived of psychophysics. Today, we pause to give thanks, and to celebrate the tremendous gift he gave us all. As part of the annual ritual, we measure thresholds to honour Fechner’s contributions, and we’ll eat Fechner-cake at our lab meeting….

Congratulations to Eugenie Roudaia and Zahra Hussain for their first first-authored VCNLab publications! (more…)

The VCNLab welcomed two new Neuroscience graduate students into the lab earlier this month. Lindsay Farber (BSc, University of Western Ontario) will be studying the effects of aging on vision, and she has also one of the newest members of our CIHR Strategic Training Program in Social Interaction and Communication in Healthy Aging. Justine Spencer (BSc, University of Ottawa) is our first joint student with Bruce Christensen (Dept of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neuroscience). Justine will be focusing on the effects of schizophrenia on vision, and is doubling her fun going to double the lab meetings! Welcome Lindsay and Justine — we’re looking forward to a wonderful year.

Two VCNLab members, Alexa Roggeveen and Eugenie Roudaia, both members of the CIHR Strategic Training Program in Communication and Social Interaction in Healthy Aging, presented their work at the 9th annual International Conference on Low Vision in Montreal. (more…)