Scientist eyes big grant

Barbara Anne Dosher, a UC Irvine cognitive scientist and dean of the School of Social Sciences, received a five-year, $1.6-million grant last week to study how the human eye and brain process visual information.

Dosher, who previously won a multi-year grant from the National Institutes of Mental Health, scored an additional one from the National Eye Institute for her pending research. Over the last seven years, she has collaborated with USC psychology professor Zhong-Lin Lu in researching visual mechanisms.

“Human vision is a complex and marvelous ability that requires the brain to seamlessly merge a number of complex computations and analyses,” Dosher said in a release. “These analyses may be limited by a number of factors, including acuity and the ability to filter out competing inputs.

“By studying how visual training improves task performance in individuals with normal vision, this project can help us understand the fundamental principles of visual processes and how training can also be used to improve performance for people with certain deficits and disorders.”

Last year, Dosher and Lu co-authored an article on visual training for Proceedings, the journal of the National Academy of Sciences. The professors conducted tests on a group of volunteers to determine whether the human eye focuses on a target and filters out clutter simultaneously or as two separate actions. The study broke ground by showing that the two actions were separate.