We are excited to announce that our lab has been awarded a three-year NSF–BSF research grant totaling 1.8 million NIS (~$600,000) to investigate how early visual experience shapes the balance between learning new information and preserving what we have already learned.
The project, “Early visual experience and the interplay between plasticity and stability in sensory learning,” is a collaboration between Prof. Amit Yashar and Prof. Bat-Sheva Hadad at the University of Haifa and Dr. Stephanie Badde at Tufts University.
Why is this important?
Both the human brain and artificial intelligence systems face the same fundamental challenge: they need to remain plastic enough to adapt to new situations while also remaining stable enough to preserve previously acquired abilities.
Understanding how successful sensory systems achieve this balance is essential for explaining how people continue to learn throughout life—and why learning may sometimes be disrupted following atypical early experience.
What will we be researching?
The project will investigate how visual experience early in life influences sensory learning later on.
A key part of the research will involve studying individuals whose vision was restored after blindness or severe visual deprivation early in life and comparing their sensory learning with that of typically developing adolescents and adults.
Using behavioral experiments together with computational modeling, we will examine learning over very different timescales—from rapid adaptation occurring within minutes to changes that develop naturally over years. We will investigate how early visual experience influences learning not only within vision, but also across sensory systems, including touch.
In parallel, we will implement these forms of learning in artificial neural networks. By systematically manipulating these models, we aim to identify computational principles that distinguish successful from impaired sensory learning in both humans and machines.
Potential impact
This research will help reveal how early experience shapes our capacity to adapt throughout life.
The findings may improve our ability to understand and predict how people respond to changing sensory demands, including changes associated with aging, injury, or restored sensory function. They may also inform the development of interactive technologies that require users to adapt to new sensory information.
More broadly, identifying how biological systems successfully balance plasticity and stability could contribute to the development of AI systems that learn continuously without forgetting what they already know.
We are looking forward to this exciting collaboration between the University of Haifa and Tufts University!