Greetings!

I am a Simons Postdoctoral Fellow in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, working with Prof. Pawan Sinha. I hold a B.Sc. in Cognitive Science from the University of Osnabrueck (Germany), an M.Sc. in Neural Systems & Computation from UZH/ETH Zurich (Switzerland), where I conducted my thesis work with Prof. Klaas Enno Stephan, and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from EPFL (Switzerland), supervised by Prof. Michael Herzog (see CV).

My main interests include vision, development, and time, with a particular focus on how our perceptual system relies on temporal regularities in the environment and degraded sensory inputs early in life. I combine computational simulations using deep neural networks with experimental work in both typical and atypical development, including with autistic individuals through SPARK and children treated for congenital blindness through Project Prakash.

News

[2025/08]: Excited to present at CCN in Amsterdam and ECVP in Mainz this August! [CCN Paper]

[2025/08]: Looking forward to our satellite event "From Child to Machine Learning" at CCN ! [Announcement]

[2025/07]: New paper on the emergence of parvo/magno pathways in Comms Biology ! [Paper] [MIT News]

[2025/05]: New article on temporal scaffolding of perceptual organization accepted in Annual Review of Psychology !

[2025/05]: Received the Small Grant Award from the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) ! [News]

[2025/02]: New paper about vernier acuity in late-sighted children published in Developmental Science ! [Paper]

[2024/12]: Work on joint biomimetic training regimens presented at NeurIPS Workshop on Behavioral ML ! [Paper]

[2024/11]: Received Professional Development Award and presented work on temporal order judgement at OPAM !

[2024/11]: New paper about temporal integration and subjective perception published in Journal of Vision ! [Paper]

[2024/08]: Presented computational work on the emergence of the parvo/magnocellular pathways at CCN ! [Paper]

[2024/05]: We were featured by Science as this week's Protostars! [Protostar section]

[2024/05]: New paper about the role of initially degraded color vision out in Science ! [Paper] [MIT News] [Science Podcast]

[2024/04]: New paper about the stability of temporal integration windows published in Journal of Vision ! [Paper]

[2024/04]: Moved to MIT to explore the developmental dimension of temporal processing in my postdoc!

[2024/03]: Defended my PhD thesis "Temporal aspects of feature integration in vision"! [Abstract]

[2024/01]: New review paper about adaptive initial degradations published in Developmental Review ! [Paper]

Overarching research themes [Details]

The significance of poor-to-rich developmental trajectories

Typically-developing newborns are equipped with very poor perceptual capabilities. Based on experiments with atypically-developed individuals and computational simulations, we propose that such initial degradations may be a feature, not a bug, of the developing nervous system, being causally responsible for acquiring later proficiencies. We report evidence in the domains of visual acuity (Vogelsang et al., PNAS, 2018), color vision (Vogelsang et al., Science, 2024), and prenatal hearing (Vogelsang et al., Dev Science, 2022), pointing to a domain-general principle (Vogelsang et al., Dev Review, 2024). This developmental proposal has recently also provided a novel account of the emergence of the parvo-magno distinction (Vogelsang et al., Comms Biology, 2025).

The role of time in perceptual organization

Processing temporal information is crucial for making sense of the dynamic world we inhabit. In my PhD, I studied long-lasting temporal integration in normally-developed adults (Vogelsang et al., Comms Psychology, 2023; Vogelsang et al., JoV, 2024a; 2024b). Given its broader significance for typical and atypical perceptual organization (Sinha et al., Annual Review of Psychology, in press), I study the mechanisms by which the brain extracts temporal regularities in normal development, in congenitally blind children who gained sight late in life, and in autistic individuals (under review & in prep.).

Selected Publications [All]

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. [Paper]

Vogelsang, M.*, Vogelsang, L.*, Gupta, P.*, Gandhi, T., 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. [Paper]

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. [Paper]

Sinha, P., Vogelsang, L., Vogelsang, M., Yonas, A., & Dimaond, S. (In press). The temporal scaffolding of sensory organization. Annual Review of Psychology.

Vogelsang, L., Drissi-Daoudi, L., & Herzog, M. (2023). Processing load, and not stimulus evidence, determines the duration of unconscious visual feature integration. Communications Psychology. [Paper]

L

Lukas Vogelsang, Ph.D.