Nihan Alp receives TÜBİTAK 3501 Career Development Grant

TÜBİTAK 3501 Career Development Grant will fund Nihan Alp research project "Disentangling the Underlying Neural Representations of Integration Processes in Local-global Motion Perception using EEG and the Neural Signature of Holistic Perception".

Local-global perception is a process which we use enormously in our daily life. For instance, reading might seem to be a very easy knowledge to gain, but this requires the integration of all the letters (local) in a proper order into a word (global). People with dorsal simultanagnosia and dyslexia have considerable difficulty in reading, which is thought to be caused by atypical local-global perception. Moreover, it is also known that individuals with autism spectrum disorder have atypical development of local-global perception. This local-global aspect of the perceptual process also plays a crucial role in motion perception. The ability to perceive motion is very important in terms of navigating and breaking the camouflage which are important aspects of the visual system. Local-global motion perception arises from the combination of the two main properties (local-global and motion perception) of the visual system. These two main properties are certainly essential, for example, to understand the direction and speed of the cars when we want to cross the street. 

The aim of this project is to trace underlying neural representations of local-global motion perception and objectively disentangle their contribution to the brain’s overall response. "