At the beginning of this summer, in May 2025, I had an incredible opportunity to attend the annual worldwide Vision Sciences Society (VSS) conference held in St. Pete Beach, Florida, United States. This five-day event brought together researchers, students, and professionals from around the world to share groundbreaking work in vision science. I was honored to present my thesis project titled “Position Specific Perceptual Learning”. 

I explored whether improvements in perceptual tasks arise from finely tuned low-level visual neurons or from higher-level cortical processing. Using a texture identification task, I examined how learning transfers across different stimuli and spatial locations—research that deepens our understanding of how the brain adapts and refines visual perception, with promising applications to fields like radiology. We found that accuracy significantly dropped when the stimuli were altered, with a large additive effect when both texture and position changed, suggesting that learning was highly stimulus-specific.

Presenting this work at VSS was both an exciting and humbling experience and it sparked valuable conversations that will help shape the next stages of my research. I was fortunate to attend the conference with my wonderful lab co-workers—one a current master’s candidate and the other a PhD candidate. Sharing the experience with them made the week even more memorable, as we supported each other’s presentations, exchanged ideas, and connected with others in the vision science community.