Sara Garcia

University College London | UCL · Institute of Ophthalmology

In order to increase perceptual precision the adult brain dynamically combines redundant information from different senses depending on their reliability. During object size estimation, for example, visual, auditory and haptic information can be integrated to increase the precision of the final size estimate. Young children, however, do not integra...

Several behavioural studies have shown that, while adults integrate sensory information in a statistically optimal fashion, children as old as 8– 10 years exhibit sensory dominance. When discriminating object size for example, young children rely more on haptic than visual or auditory information (Gori et al., 2008; Petrini et al., 2014). However,...

Human adults can combine perceptual estimates from different senses to minimize uncertainty, by taking a reliability-weighted average (the maximum likelihood estimate, MLE). Although research has shown that healthy human adults reweight estimates as their reliability changes from one trial to the next, less is known about how humans adapt to gradua...

Psychophysical studies have frequently found that adults with normal hearing exhibit systematic errors (biases) in their auditory localisation judgments. Here we tested (i) whether systematic localisation errors could reflect reliance on prior knowledge, as has been proposed for other systematic perceptual biases, and (ii) whether auditory localisa...

This article details how to control light emitting diodes (LEDs) using an ordinary desktop computer. By combining digitally addressable LEDs with an off-the-shelf microcontroller (Arduino), multiple LEDs can be controlled independently and with a high degree of temporal, chromatic, and luminance precision. The proposed solution is safe (can be powe...

Normally sighted adults can combine visual and auditory cues to location optimally by weighting each according to its reliability (Alais & Burr, Curr Biol 2004). Here we investigated the extent to which observers take into account natural variations in sensory precision across the visual field. This will provide a baseline for studying cue combinat...

Human adults with normal vision can combine visual landmark and non-visual self-motion cues to improve their navigational precision. Here we asked whether blind individuals treated with a retinal prosthesis could also benefit from using the resultant new visual signal together with non-visual information when navigating. Four patients (blind for 15...

http://iovs.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2271615&resultClick=1

Quantity skills have been extensively studied in terms of their development and pathological decline. Recently, numerosity discrimination (i.e., how many items are in a set) has been shown to be resilient to healthy ageing despite relying on inhibitory skills, but whether processing continuous quantities such as time and space is equally well-maint...