Hanna Willis

Stipendiary Lecturer in Psychology
Experimental Psychology
Medicine
Psychology and Philosophy
MSci (York)

My research focusses on human vision and in particular what happens when there is damage to the visual system. When the primary visual cortex (V1) is damaged, through stroke or trauma, we can lose our vision and become blind on one side of the visual world. This is known as hemianopia. In my DPhil project I am interested in understanding residual processing in hemianopia and whether rehabilitation techniques can be used to improve visual processing. I am using MRI and behavioural methods to understand these questions.

Teaching

My specialist teaching area is visual perception and I teach multiple tutorials focussed on this. I also supervise Medical students for the Final Honour School projects. 

Research Interests

I am interested in the functioning of the human visual system, and how individuals see things differently especially after damage to the visual system. I use MRI and behavioural methods to understand how different areas of the brain contribute to these individual differences in perception. 

Selected Publications

Krishnan, S., Cler, G., Smith, H. J., Willis, H. E., Asaridou, S. S., Healy, M. P., ... & Watkins, K. E. (2022). Quantitative MRI reveals differences in striatal myelin in children with DLD. eLife.

Krishnan, S., Asaridou, S. S., Cler, G. J., Smith, H. J., Willis, H. E., Healy, M. P., ... & Watkins, K. E. (2021). Functional organisation for verb generation in children with developmental language disorder. NeuroImage, 226, 117599.

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