Matt Dye
PhD, University of Southampton, 2001
Research Associate, Brain & Cognitive Sciences, Center for Visual Science, Center for Language Sciences
- Contact Information
- Research Overview
- Research Details
- Recent Publications
- Research Collaborators
- Courses
Contact Information
- Meliora 133B
- Brain and Cognitive Sciences
- University of Rochester
- Rochester, NY 14627-0268
- (585) 275-0759 (voice)
- (585) 506-1876 (tty)
- (585) 442-9216 (fax)
- mdye(at)bcs(dot)rochester(dot)edu
Office Hours
By appointment.
Research Overview
Does being born deaf mean that you see better? Does playing a lot of video games change the way you process visual information? These everyday questions are what motivates my research and lead me to my studies in the field of brain plasticity. These two questions, of course, share both similarities and differences. Both refer to changes in function following altered sensory experience. In the case of deaf individuals, the question asks whether there is some compensation: if I cannot hear, does my vision improve in order to allow me to function succesfully in my multi-sensory environment? For video gamers, the question seems a little different: if I push my visual skills to the extreme, do I see any improvement in those skills?
Research Details
I conduct research into deafness and video gaming because of an interest in the effects of altered sensory experience on brain development and function. But for someone interested in brain plasticity and change, these two domains ask subtly different questions. In deaf individuals we can ask questions about early brain reorganization in the face of altered sensory input. If a sense is not stimulated from early in development, what happens to the neural pathways and brain areas we normally associate with that sense? What cognitive changes do we see in these individuals? How does early brain reorganization allow these skills to develop and provide the individual with ways in which to navigate and survive in their environment? By conducting research with video gamers we can ask questions about the degree and scope of plasticity in adult brains. Do the extreme environments provided by gaming consoles allow us to observe plastic changes in neural matter previously thought to relatively insensitive to such manipulation? And in children who play video games, we can ask how this activity interacts with the normal time course of cognitive and perceptual development. Does playing these games enhance the development of visual and motor skills? Are there cognitive costs associated with any observed benefits? Again, what neural mechanisms underpin observed functional changes.
One area of cognitive function that has proved especially fruitful for studying these research questions is visual attention. Attention has been characterized in many ways, but most would probably agree that attention refers to a set of skills and/or mechanisms that allow an organism to navigate and process information in a world that provides a massive and unmanageable amount of sensory information. That is, there is so much information available to our senses, that we need a way in which that information can be selected, a way in which we can focus on what is salient, and ignore what is irrelevant. What is salient or irrelevant will change from moment to moment, and what is selected may be under our control or driven by the environment itself. But some degree of selection must occur if we are to engage in meaningful or purposeful action related to our environment. This makes our research questions more specific. Do deaf individuals rely more on visual information from their environment? If so, how do the mechanisms of visual attention allow them to do so? Do video gamers learn to attend to information in different ways, or integrate information from different modalities more quickly?
Below are some papers and posters that reflect the work I have been doing to answer these questions. A more complete list of publications and achievments is available by downloading my curriculum vitae. I also have a more complete research statement and a statement of my teaching philosophy. If you have any questions relating to this work, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Recent Publications
Action Video Games
- Dye, M.W.G. & Bavelier, D. (submitted). Development of visual attention skills in school-age children who play or do not play action video games. Developmental Science.
- Dye, M.W.G., Green, C.S. & Bavelier, D. (submitted). Attentional networks and their development in action video game players. Cognition.
- Dye, M.W.G., Green, C.S. & Bavelier, D. (due 2008). Faster reaction times across domains: Transfer of learning with action videogames. Current Directions in Psychological Science.
- Dye, M.W.G. & Bavelier, D. (2004). Playing video games enhances visual attention in children [Abstract]. Journal of Vision, 4 (11), 40a.
Deafness
- Hauser, P.C. & Dye, M.W.G. (in prep). Deafness and visual attention. To appear in M. Marschark and P. Spencer (Eds), Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language, and Education, Volume 2. Oxford University Press.
- Bavelier, D. & Dye, M.W.G. (in prep). Loss of a sense: Effect on others, psychological. To appear in B. Goldstein (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Perception. Sage Publications.
- Dye, M.W.G., Hauser, P.C. & Bavelier, D. (in prep). Early auditory deprivation results in a spatial redistribution of visual attention resources.
- Dye, M.W.G. & Bavelier, D. (in prep). Spatial distribution of visual attention resources in deaf and hearing children.
- Dye, M.W.G., Hauser, P.C. & Bavelier, D. (in press). Visual skills and cross-modal plasticity in deaf readers: Possible implications for acquiring meaning from print. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
- Dye, M.W.G., Hauser, P.C. & Bavelier, D. (in press). Visual attention in deaf children and adults: Implications for learning environments. In M. Marschark & P.C. Hauser (Eds), Deaf Cognition: Foundations and Outcomes. OUP.
- Hauser, P.C., Dye, M.W.G., Boutla, M., Green, C.S. & Bavelier, D. (2007). Deafness and visual enumeration: Not all aspects of attention are modified by deafness. Brain Research, 1153, 178-187.
- Hauser, P.C., Cohen, J., Dye, M.W.G. & Bavelier, D. (2007). Visual constructive and visual-motor skills in Deaf native signers. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 12 (2), 148-157.
- Dye, M.W.G., Baril, D.E. & Bavelier, D. (2007). Which aspects of visual attention are changed by deafness? The case of the Attentional Network Test. Neuropsychologia, 48 (8), 1801-1811.
- Bavelier, D., Dye, M.W.G. & Hauser, P.C. (2006). Do deaf individuals see better? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10 (11), 512-518.
Sign Language
- Dye, M.W.G. (in prep). Sign language processing. To appear in R. Pfau, M. Steinbach & B. Woll (Eds), Sign Language: An International Handbook. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
- Dye, M.W.G. & Shih, S. (2006). Phonological priming in British Sign Language. In L. M. Goldstein, D. H. Whalen and C. T. Best (Eds), Laboratory Phonology 8. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
- Vinson, D.P., Vigliocco, G., Woolfe, T., Dye, M.W.G. & Woll, B. (2005). Language and imagery: Effects of language modality. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 272, 1859-1863.
- Agrafiotis, D., Canagarajah, N., Bull, D.R. & Dye, M. (2003). Perceptually optimised sign language video coding based on eye tracking analysis. Electronics Letters, 39 (24), 1703-1705.
This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.
Research Collaborators
- Daphne Bavelier, Associate Professor, Brain & Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester
- Peter Hauser, Assistant Professor, Department of research and Teacher Education, National Technical Institute for the Deaf
Research Support
- "Neuroanatomical Underpinnings of Reading in Deaf Individuals" DANA Foundation Grant (2005-2008).