Debbie Giaschi

PhD, MA, BSc

Investigator, BC Children's Hospital

Visual perceptual abilities develop rapidly in infants, but considerable maturation occurs in preschool and elementary school-aged children. Several things can go wrong during the course of this development and a child may be left with visual problems that interfere with different aspects of life. Of particular interest are motion and depth perception, reading, and hand-eye coordination. The goal of our research is to understand the typical development of the underlying brain structures that control these perceptual abilities and to discover the changes in the brain that result in perceptual impairments. We focus specifically on a developmental visual disorder called amblyopia, or lazy eye, and a developmental reading disorder called dyslexia.