Greetings!

I am currently a Simons Postdoctoral Fellow at the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, supervised by Prof. Pawan Sinha. Previously, I obtained a B.Sc. in Cognitive Science from the University of Osnabrueck (Germany), a M.Sc. in Neural Systems & Computation from UZH/ETH Zurich (Switzerland), having written my thesis 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 visual perception, temporal processing, and sensory development, with a particular focus on how our perceptual system may rely on temporal regularities in the environment as well as certain sensory characteristics early in life. I engage in computational simulations and experimental work in both typical and atypical development, including with autistic individuals and children treated for congenital blindness through Project Prakash.

News

[2025/01]: New paper about vernier acuity in late-sighted children accepted in Developmental Science !

[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 published 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 remarkably poor perceptual capabilities. Based on experiments with atypically-developed individuals as well as computational simulations, we recently proposed that such initially degraded perceptual experience may be a feature, rather than a bug, of the developing nervous system, being causally responsible for the acquisition of later perceptual 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 behind the potential functional significance of poor-to-rich developmental trajectories (Vogelsang et al., Dev Review, 2024).

The role of time in sensory organization

The processing of temporal information is crucial for making sense of the dynamic world we inhabit. In my PhD, I have studied long-lasting temporal feature integration in the visual system in normally-developed adults (Vogelsang et al., Comms Psychology, 2023; Vogelsang et al., JoV, 2024a; 2024b). In light of its developmental significance, I recently began studying the mechanisms by which the brain extracts temporal regularities more broadly and across populations: throughout normal development, in congenitally blind children who gained sight late in life, and in autistic individuals.

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]

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]

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