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!

We are proud to congratulate Laurina Fazioli on successfully defending her doctoral dissertation.

Title:

Investigation of perceptual decision-making in autism spectrum disorder

Advisors:

Dr. Amit Yashar and Pr. Bat-Sheva Hadad

Summary:

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition affecting various aspects of behavior, including difficulties in social communication, repetitive behavior, and restricted interests. Atypical sensory processing has been increasingly recognized as a core feature, yet the mechanisms underlying atypical perception remain unclear. Previous research largely focused on perceptual skills (e.g., sensitivity), overlooking perception as an integrative process. Perceptual decision-making—the process of making inferences based on sensory information—lies at the interface between sensory processing and behavior, and provides a systemic model to investigate perception at multiple levels: (1) perceptual inference (first-order decision), and (2) confidence in this inference (second-order decision, reflecting metacognitive abilities). However, perceptual decision-making in autism has received little interest.

Here, we aimed to investigate perceptual decision-making in autism within the Bayesian perception framework—positing that perception results from combining sensory uncertainty, prior knowledge, and reward information. Specifically, we asked: (1) To what extent does first-order decision in autism incorporate decision components (i.e., sensory uncertainty, prior, and reward)? (2) To what extent is higher-level metacognitive decision-making in autism contingent on first-order decision components?

In three experiments—each manipulating one Bayesian information—autistic (n = 59) and non-autistic (n = 83) participants performed an orientation categorization task, reporting stimulus category (first-order task) and decision confidence (second-order task). We manipulated sensory uncertainty, prior, and reward by varying stimulus contrast (Experiment 1), category probability (Experiment 2), and points per correct answer (Experiment 3). Using psychophysics and computational approaches, we quantified the effects of Bayesian information on first- (i.e., sensitivity, decision criterion), and second-order (i.e., decision confidence) decisions. 

Both groups showed comparable first-order performances—as they exhibited similar sensitivity and criterion shift—demonstrating a suboptimal, but typical integration of each Bayesian information during first-order perceptual decision-making. However, while non-autistic participants displayed constant metacognitive abilities across experiments, autistic metacognitive abilities depended on the Bayesian information biasing their perceptual decision. Specifically, autistic participants demonstrated enhanced metacognitive abilities when first-order decisions were adjusted from sensory evidence alone.

Contrary to dominant views suggesting atypical first-order perceptual inferences in autism, our findings indicate that qualitative differences in higher-order—rather than lower-level—perceptual processes may constitute a core component of autistic perception, and shape the way autistic individuals engage with sensory input. These findings have critical implications in the understanding of core mechanisms of autism, with relevance beyond autism research, such as diagnostic and rehabilitation domains.

Congratulations Laurina!

We are pleased to announce that two of our lab members, Salman Sarkar and Dr. Laurina Fazioli, have been accepted to present their research at upcoming international conferences.

Dr. Laurina Fazioli will present a poster titled “Perceptual Meta-Uncertainty in Autism” at the International Society for Autism Research Annual Meeting (INSAR 2026) in Prague, Czech Republic, April 22–25, 2026.

Salman Sarkar will give a talk titled “Early Deprivation Selectively Impairs Cardinal Orientation Sensitivity and Reduces the Oblique Effect” at the Vision Sciences Society (VSS) 2026, taking place in Florida, USA, May 15–19, 2026.

We are excited to announce that two of our doctoral students, Salman Sarkar and Zenab Saleh, have been accepted to present their research at the 47th European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP), taking place in Mainz, Germany, from Sunday, August 24th to Thursday, August 28th, 2025.

Salman Sarkar

Talk Title: Competing Binocular Input During Development Disrupts Sensitivity to Environmental Regularities: Evidence from Congenital and Developmental Cataracts

Summary:
Salman’s research explored how early visual experience shapes the brain’s ability to learn from environmental regularities. Focusing on the “oblique effect” — the human tendency to perceive vertical and horizontal orientations more accurately than diagonal ones — his study examined individuals with various forms of visual deprivation due to cataracts. Strikingly, children who had cataracts in one eye later in childhood showed a reduced oblique effect, unlike those with bilateral deprivation from birth. These findings suggest that competing visual input may disrupt perceptual learning more than the absence of input, helping to define sensitive periods in visual development and highlighting the complexity of asymmetrical early experience.

Zenab Saleh

Talk Title: Mixture Modeling of Crowding Errors Reveals Reduced Peripheral Bias in Autism

Summary:
Zenab’s study on visual crowding in autistic and non-autistic adults analyzed how participants estimated the orientation and spatial frequency of Gabor patches in cluttered visual scenes, and found key differences in perceptual processing. While non-autistic individuals tended to rely more on outer (peripheral) distractors, autistic individuals showed a reduced peripheral bias, giving equal weight to inner and outer flankers. This suggests a fundamental difference in how visual information is processed in autism, particularly in complex, cluttered environments.

We are thrilled to announce that PhD student Laurina Fazioli has published her first authored paper titled “Suboptimal but intact integration of Bayesian components during perceptual decision-making in autism” in the prestigious journal Molecular Autism (Fazioli, Hadad, Denison, & Yashar, 2025).

The Research

Laurina’s research focuses on visual perception and decision-making in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Her current project, supervised by Dr. Amit Yashar and Dr. Bat Sheva Hadad, investigates how autistic individuals integrate prior knowledge and sensory information when making perceptual decisions. This framework, known as Bayesian perception, is a powerful tool for understanding how the brain combines different sources of information to arrive at a conclusion.

Key Findings

Laurina’s study employed psychophysical methods and computational modeling to examine how autistic and non-autistic individuals weigh sensory evidence and prior knowledge during perceptual tasks. The findings revealed that while autistic individuals showed suboptimal performance overall, their integration of these Bayesian components remained intact. These results challenge the notion that autistic individuals entirely lack the ability to integrate information probabilistically.

Applications

Laurina’s research helps to better understand perceptual decision-making in ASD. This knowledge can inform the development of targeted interventions to improve perceptual processing in individuals with ASD.

Congratulations Laurina!

Our lab is excited to announce that we have been awarded a prestigious 5-year grant from the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) to investigate the complex relationship between visual crowding and letter recognition. This is the lab’s second ISF grant, with the previous research studying visual attention and perceptual learning in visual crowding.

Why is this important?

Reading is a fundamental skill that relies on our ability to accurately recognize individual letters. However, visual crowding, a phenomenon where our perception of a target object is hindered by surrounding objects, can significantly impair this process.

What will we be researching?

We will explore how our brains’ ability to learn statistical regularities in the environment interacts with these processes.

Specifically: 

• How our brains utilize both word-level (lexical) and letter-level (sub-lexical) information to recognize letters, especially outside the center of vision.
• How visual crowding affects the reading abilities of young learners and its relationship to their overall reading proficiency.
• Predicting future reading difficulties by identifying children who are particularly susceptible to visual crowding

Potential Impact

This research stands at the intersection of cognitive science and education. By understanding the mechanisms of letter recognition and visual processing, we aim to:

• Develop more effective reading instruction methods
• Create optimized visual displays that support learning
• Provide early identification and intervention for children at risk of reading difficulties

Our work promises to illuminate the complex cognitive processes underlying reading, potentially transforming educational practices.