Welcome!

A Greeting From Gordon:

Gordon wearing a tan shirt and tie.
Audio file

I am a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. I'm the director of the Minnesota Laboratory for Low-Vision Research and a founding member and Scientific Co-Director of the Center for Applied and Translational Sensory Science (CATSS).

About Our Lab

Lab members at the 2018 Holiday Party hosted at Gordon's home.
Lab members gathered for the 2018 Holiday Party hosted at Gordon's home.

Our laboratory, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is internationally recognized for its pioneering research on low vision.

Low vision is any chronic visual impairment, not correctable by glasses or contact lenses, that has an impact on daily life.

Low vision can be caused by macular degeneration, glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, cataract, retinitis pigmentosa, and many other eye disorders. About 5.7 million Americans are visually impaired. Of these, about 260,000 are blind without useful pattern vision, and the rest have low vision. As of 2015, there were approximately 440 million people worldwide with impaired vision.

My lab members include postdoctoral fellows, doctoral students, undergraduates, and lab staff, all of whom specialize in vision research. Our research is dedicated to understanding how different forms of low vision affect performance on important everyday tasks including reading, mobility and object recognition. Two notable applications of  our research have been the invention of an  eye chart for measuring reading vision, the MNREAD Acuity Chart, and the development of software and other methods for evaluating the visual accessibility of architectural spaces. We are proud of the national and international recognition we've received for our discoveries.

Participants Wanted

Photo of participant sitting on a platform wearing blur goggles and headphones, looking at a movable panel set to look like a step up. Both the floor and the panel have vertical black and white stripes.
A normally sighted participant is wearing blurring goggles to simulate reduced acuity. She is being tested on her ability to see a step in the presence of pattern features on the ground. This is a picture from a previous study.

We are always looking for individuals with normal or corrected to normal vision as well as individuals with visual impairments. If you are interested in being a participant in one of our studies, please email [email protected].