Central research interest:
The effects of immaturities and abnormalities of the visual system on the development of vision.
Why is this interesting?
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Vision is a principal input for an infant's learning and development.
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Normal postnatal development of the eye and information processing in the brain depend on the quality of vision infants experience after birth.
Methods we use in our lab to study what a baby can see
Projects in our laboratory:
The studies in the lab incorporate approaches from the fields of neuroscience, psychology and medicine. We study the ways in which visual information is processed in the developing visual system and how infants and young children manage to focus and align their eyes. We study infants and children with typically developing visual systems and those with conditions that we need to understand better, such as amblyopia and strabismus. Our long term goal is to improve the approaches to preventing and managing these conditions.
Currently we are working on three projects:
- i) Studying the relationship between focusing and alignment of the eyes (accommodation and vergence) and how it might lead to the development of eye turns (strabismus). This project is funded by the National Eye Institute.
- ii) Studying the impact of blur in one eye on the function of the two eyes during development. This project is funded by Fight for Sight.
- iii) Studying how neural connections in the brain are adjusted after birth to allow the visual system to interpret information in contours and boundaries.
Our other recent projects have been published in the following manuscripts:
- Wang J, Candy TR (2005) Higher-order monochromatic aberrations of the human infant eye. Journal of Vision. 5(6):543-555.
- Blade PJ, Candy TR. (2006) Validation of the PowerRefractor for measuring human infant refraction. Optometry & Vision Science 83(6):346-53.
- Tondel GM, Candy TR (2007) Human infants' accommodation responses to dynamic stimuli. Investigative Opthalmology & Visual Science. Feb:48(2):949-956.
- Candy TR, Bharadwaj SR (2007) The stability of steady-state accommodation in human infants. Journal of Vision. 7/11/4.
- Tondel GM, Candy TR (2008) Accommodation and vergence latencies in human infants. Vision Research, 48,564-576.
- Wang J, Candy TR, Teel DFW, Jacobs RJ (2008) Longitudinal chromatic aberration of the human infant eye. J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 25, 2263-2270 (2008)
- 'Bharadwaj SR, Candy TR. Cues for the neural control of retinal defocus and eye alignment during postnatal human development. J Vis. 2008 Dec 22; 8(16):14, 1-16.