Dr. Stevens main focus is the use of psychophysical methods in combination with MRI-based methods to study how the brain adapts to perturbations of sensory and motor systems. We identify “natural experiments”, conditions where normal functions have been perturbed and try to understand what the consequences are for behavior and brain organization. Studies have focused on the effects of age of onset of blindness on auditory perceptual abilities and their relationship to reorganization of visual cortical areas. Recent collaborative work demonstrated that age of blindness onset across different species, including humans, affects the surface area expansion of primary visual cortex in a developmentally predictable way, and is consistent with a sensitive period that ends prior to the sensitive period associated with presence or absence of environmental stimulation.

A new direction of research is in the use of combined simultaneous EEG-fMRI to examine sleep states on different aspects of brain metabolic function. These studies will be used to study how sleep states relate to different aspects brain metabolic function in health and trauma, and how they influence different aspects of cognition and affect.