Project:
Examining higher-order temporal processing in autism
Laboratories:
Pawan Sinha, Ph.D. and Charles Nelson, Ph.D.
Biographical Information:
Lukas received a B.Sc. in Cognitive Science from the University of Osnabrueck (Germany), a M.Sc. in Neural Systems & Computation from the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich (Switzerland), and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from EPFL (Switzerland). His main interests include temporal processing, sensory development, and visual perception. After having examined the potential adaptive significance of initial degradations during early perceptual development in his B.Sc. thesis with Prof. Pawan Sinha (MIT), he worked on the computational modeling of EEG signatures of perceptual inference under volatility during his M.Sc. thesis with Prof. Klaas Enno Stephan (UZH/ETH Zurich) and used psychophysical tools to study long-lasting temporal feature integration in the visual system during his Ph.D. with Prof. Michael Herzog (EPFL).
Current Work:
Every developing nervous system confronts, and has to overcome, its own version of what William James famously described as ‘one great blooming, buzzing confusion’. How sensory experience is being transformed into a sensorium of meaningful entities and their inter-relationships lies at the very core of understanding an individual’s perceptual organization. A powerful key to understanding part of this organization may lie in the temporal structure of the natural sensory environment. In this project, I seek to examine the mechanisms by which the brain uses temporal regularities to organize its sensorium, their developmental significance, and how they may vary between autistic and neurotypical individuals. This examination includes, for instance, testing the capability of detecting probabilistic consistency between streams of simultaneous sensory events and the ability to learn probabilistic associations between cues and subsequently presented targets in probabilistic learning tasks. Taken together, this work may help elucidate the mechanisms and development of temporal processing and contribute to a more comprehensive characterization of the autistic phenotype in the sensory domain.
Keywords:
Temporal processing, development, prediction, autism, human behavior
Publications:
Vogelsang, M.*, Vogelsang, L.*, Gupta, P.*, Gandhi, T. K., Shah, P., Swami, P., Gilad-Gutnick, S., Ben-Ami, S., Diamond, S., Ganesh, S., & Sinha, P. (2024). Impact of early visual experience on later usage of color cues. Science.
Vogelsang, L.*, Vogelsang, M.*, Pipa, G., Diamond, S., & Sinha, P. (2024). Butterfly effects in perceptual development: A review of the ‘adaptive initial degradation’ hypothesis. Developmental Review.
Vogelsang, L. & Sinha, P. (2023). Modeling Vision. In: Cambridge Handbook for Computational Cognitive Science, Cambridge University Press.
Vogelsang, L., Drissi-Daoudi, L., & Herzog, M. (2023). Processing load, and not stimulus evidence, determines the duration of unconscious visual feature integration. Communications Psychology.
Vogelsang, L.*, Gilad-Gutnick, S.*, Ehrenberg, E., Yonas, A., Diamond, S., Held, R., & Sinha, P. (2018). Potential downside of high initial visual acuity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.