My group works on visual dysfunction that may result from disease or injury. Our aim is to understand visual dysfunction better and also to increase our understanding of normal visual processing by finding out how visual function is changed by specific lesions of an otherwise normal visual system. We are particularly interested in how visual areas of the brain are organized, how organization is disprupted as a result of visual disorders and how reorganization of the visual brain might underlie behavioural adaptations to visual loss. In the process of exploring these issues, we have underatken research on patients with a wide variety of visual disorders, which arise as a results of damage to or disease of the retina or the brain. We are currently working on patients with albinism and patients with Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD).

Our main focus is to measure the properties of visual areas of the brain and to do this we employ functional Magnetic Resonance imaging and MEG techniques alongside more conventional VEP measurements. We are also very interested in evaluating how each of the differing techniques can contribute to the objective assessment of visual function, so that visual disorders might be better detected and diagnosed. Our imaging work is undertaken at the York neuro-Imaging Centre (YNiC).