Understanding the role of attention in visual rehabilitation - Health Tech Lunch - Dr. Paul Matusz

Health Tech Lunch - 06.02.2018, 12h00 - Sierre, Techno-Pôle (Room Electra)

Presentation by Dr. Paul Matusz (HES-SO Valais-Wallis & UNIL)

Title : Understanding the role of attention in visual rehabilitation: Amblyopia as a model

Abstract : Pediatric amblyopia (PA; “lazy eye”) is the most common vision disorder in children, reflected by decreased vision acuity in an eye that is otherwise functions normally. Traditional PA treatments, such as patching, are slow, with the delayed patient rehabilitation creating a cascade of problems for the patients themselves (from low self-esteem to bullying), their families and the society. A substiantal number of children never recovers normal levels of visual acuity in the weaker eye. As such, there are several pertinent questions related to both the etiology and rehabilitation of amblyopia. First, it remains to be shown whether intervention programs shown to improve visual and/or attentional functions in adults can rehabilitate PA - when turned into child-friendly, engaging yet attention-demanding games on in-home devices. Second, we need to identify tools to assess “functional vision” skills, such as reading or face processing, and whether game-based interventions also improve those in PA. Lastly, we need to understand the role of low-level sensory and perceptual versus higher-level cognitive processes in driving basic and functional vision plasticity in PA. I will present a recent project that aims to fill in these lacks in knowledge by assessing the relative importance of sensory and attentional brain processes in vision recovery in PA as a function of treatments training sterovision (3D vision) skills in context of engaging games delivered on virtual-reality devices. The project builds on the synergies across eHealth data-analysis solutions, new rehabilitation approaches and neuroimaging expertise present between the Information Systems Institute (HES-SO Valais) and University of Lausanne (Dept. of Radiology & the University Ophthalmology Service). If successful, the new rehabilitation approach would have the potential to be adapted to other pediatric as well as adult vision/sensory, cognitive and/or motor disorders.

Bio : I completed my Ph.D. in 2013 at Birkbeck College London under the supervision of Martin Eimer. In my Ph.D. project, I employed event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to demonstrate how early in the adult brain the attentional object selection is controlled by salience-based and goal-driven types of multisensory processes. Since completing my Ph.D and together with Gaia Scerif at Oxford University, I have been studying how the dynamic interplay between multisensory processing, selective-attention skills and experience shape object recognition in school-aged children. In 2014, I started a 3-year-long postdoctoral training in employing state-of-the-art EEG signal analysis methods to understand brain and cognitive mechanisms orchestrating the perception of, selective attention to and learning of simple and complex multisensory objects, across the lifespan. In 2016 I received my first competitive grant as principal investigator and have since received several additional competitve grants as principal or co-investigator to study the role of multisensory attention in learning and object recognition in healthy and atypical populations.

​Registration : https://doodle.com/poll/9zme8ra3q77s8msi