Susan Daniel, O.D. has been in private practice in Carlsbad, California since 1992. She obtained her Bachelor of Science degree from the University of California at Davis in 1987 and her Doctor of Optometry degree at the Southern California College of Optometry in 1991. She is the Past-President of the Neuro-Optometric Rehabilitation Association and is a frequent lecturer domestically and internationally. 

Her practice specializes in neuro-optometric rehabilitation and developmental visual evaluations for non-speakers who have autism, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, stroke, brain injury and other neurological disorders. She provides optical treatments and vision therapy to non-speakers to improve the visual skills needed to use a letterboard or typing to communicate and improve visual information processing, posture and visual perception. She loves consulting and teaching parents, spelling/typing intructors, and other developmental optometrists about vision and communication. She is licensed in California, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona, providing telehealth vision therapy for those who do not have a provider near them.

Dr. Daniel is a consultant for the Tri-City Medical Center Acute Rehabilitation Clinic and Scripps Encinitas Brain Injury Rehabilitation Clinic. She also provides evaluations and vision therapy services for special education students from San Diego County School Districts. She is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the Illinois College of Optometry and teaches an externship rotation in vision rehabilitation and therapy to 4th year optometry doctorate students.Dr. Daniel enjoys sharing her personal experiences of how her vision therapy practice has been enhanced by what she has learned from the multi-disciplinary team of teachers, doctors, therapists and other parents who have helped her non-speaking autistic adult son, and especially from her patients with neurological and developmental challenges.

Bria Long is the Director of the Visual Learning Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego.

Dr. Long is supported by an NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award, which funded a portion of my postdoctoral work with Michael C. Frank at Stanford, where she worked in the Language & Cognition lab for seven years.  She completed my Ph.D. in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, where she worked with George Alvarez, Talia Konkle, and Susan Carey in both the Harvard Vision Lab and the Laboratory for Developmental

Dr. Long earned her M.S. from the  Cogmaster  program at École Normale Supérieure in Paris working with Sid Kouider and Emmanuel Dupoux at LSCP, funded by a Fulbright Advanced Student award. As an undergraduate, she worked with Caitlin Fausey and Lera Boroditsky for her Honors Thesis in Human Biology at Stanford University.

More about the Visual Learning Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego:

We are a group of scientists broadly interested in the development of perception and cognition. For example, when we open our eyes, we don’t see “a blooming, buzzing confusion:” we see tables, chairs, computers, books, and cups. How do we learn to connect incoming patterns of light with our knowledge about all of these objects, their verbal labels, and the categories they belong to? How do we learn to derive visual meaning?

These questions—among others—drive our research.  We take an ecological approach throughout our work by focusing on how learning occurs in everyday, naturalistic contexts. Our work leverages innovations in machine learning to help us both analyze large datasets (e.g., videos taken from the infant perspective or digital drawings made by children, see right) and to construct models of how learning unfolds over time.

Timothy Brady is the Director of the Vision and Memory Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego. 

He is  a Professor of Psychology (Principal Investigator) Tim received his PhD from MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, working with Dr. Aude Oliva, and performed postdoctoral research in the Department of Psychology at Harvard working with Dr. George Alvarez in the Harvard Vision Lab.

More about the Vision and Memory Laboratory:

Our primary research goal is to understand how visual information is represented by the visual system and how it is encoded and integrated into memory.  What constraints do visual processing and prior knowledge impose on information encoding? How do visual representations transform from perception to working memory to long-term memory?

How do we store information about items that are strongly related to other items or to the context?

Our research approach draws on formal models to understand the common ground between vision and memory. In particular, we develop behavioral and sometimes EEG or fMRI paradigms designed to tap what information is represented and what information persists in visual memory, and use signal detection-based, Bayesian, connectionist and information theoretic tools to formalize the underlying memory representations. Our research has focused on three core areas: the representations involved in visual working memory and visual long-term memory; the nature of our existing knowledge of objects and scenes; and what kinds of subtle statistical regularities observers learn from the world.

This presentation addresses a critical gap in optometric care: effectively evaluating and treating non-speaking patients with apraxia. As alternative communication methods like spelled communication become increasingly recognized, optometrists must understand the unique visual demands these methods place on patients and adapt their clinical approaches accordingly.

Dr. Susan Daniel draws on extensive clinical experience to guide developmental optometrists through the assessment and treatment considerations specific to this population. Participants will learn to identify the most prevalent visual conditions in non-speaking apraxic patients and understand how these conditions impact their ability to communicate effectively through alternative methods. The seminar moves beyond traditional testing protocols, teaching practitioners how to modify visual skill and perceptual assessments for patients who cannot provide verbal responses. Participants will gain practical knowledge about evidence-based intervention strategies, including the selection of appropriate vision therapy activities that support both visual development and communication goals. The course also covers the application of yoked prism prescriptions and syntonic phototherapy to improve regulation and visual performance in this unique patient population.

Learning to see is a fundamental challenge for the child and a fundamental puzzle for the cognitive scientist. Children must learn to derive stable meaning from highly variable visual input, and to generalize flexibly across very different instances of the same category—for example, understanding that a stuffed whale and a real whale refer to the same concept. In this talk, I present work that addresses this question by directly measuring the visual input children receive in their everyday lives. I describe the BabyView dataset, a large-scale collection of egocentric videos—now over 1500 hours—recorded from the perspective of infants and young children, and show how it enables new analyses of children’s real-world visual experience. Using this dataset, I’l first examine how children encounter objects across diverse viewpoints, contexts, and representational formats, revealing substantially greater variability than is typically captured in curated image datasets, and relatively low alignment with the language that children hear. Second,  I will characterize changes in children’s early social learning environment by using pose detectors to analyze video datasets of infants’ egocentric visual experience, finding that activity contexts (e.g., mealtime) and postural development are major sources of variability.Together, these findings advance ecologically grounded theories of visual concept learning and highlight children's roles as active participants in both the construction and refinement of their visual concepts in a deeply social world. 

Our visual experience feels continuous and richly detailed, yet the visual system faces important limitations: our eyes move several times per second and only a small region of the retina provides high-acuity vision. As a result, the brain must rely on memory to integrate these brief snapshots into a coherent representation of the visual world. In this talk, I will present research showing that perception depends critically on visual memory. Drawing on both electrophysiological and psychophysical findings, I will discuss the limits of visual memory and how the brain stores and integrates visual information over time to support stable perception and rich visual behaviors.

Greg Appelbaum is the Director of the Human Performance Optimization Laboratory at the University of California San Diego.

Greg  is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. He received a B.A in Psychology from Emory University in 1995, and a Masters and Ph.D. from the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, Irvine in 2002 and 2004, respectively. Since 2011, Dr. Appelbaum has been conducting DARPA and Army Research Office-funded research addressing the role of vision, and vision training in sports. This line of research has included randomized and controlled studies testing vision training interventions, has been conducted with thousands of athletes at all levels of accomplishment, and has led to over a dozen research articles and three review articles.

More about the Human Performance Optimization Laboratory: 

At UCSD, Dr. Appelbaum directs the Interventional Psychiatry Research Program and heads the Human Performance Optimization lab, an applied neuroscience laboratory that researches innovative approaches for accelerating learning and remediating psychiatric and neurological deficits. His research utilizes behavioral psychometrics and multiple complimentary human neuroimaging (e.g. fMRI, EEG, fNIRS) and neurostimulation (e.g. TMS, ECT) techniques to understand the interplay of perception, attention, memory and motor control.

Dr. Justin S. Matsuura graduated from the University of California Irvine with a Bachelor of Science degree in Biological Sciences. Dr. Matsuura received his Doctor of Optometry degree from Southern California College of Optometry at Marshall B. Ketchum University. His clinical externships were completed at the University Eye Center at Ketchum Health in Anaheim, University Eye Center Los Angeles, Southern Arizona VA Health Care System in Tucson, AZ, and the San Diego Center for Vision Care. As a result of his education and clinical training, Dr. Matsuura is licensed to use and prescribe therapeutic pharmaceutical agents, diagnose, treat, and manage patients with glaucoma, and perform lacrimal irrigation/dilation procedures in addition to providing comprehensive and specialty eye examinations for patients of all ages. He is also well trained and up to date with the most recent advances in pediatric optometry, vision therapy, sports vision and neuro-rehabilitation optometry. 

Dr. Fortenbacher received his Doctor of Optometry from the Michigan College of Optometry at Ferris State University in 1979. His interest in developmental vision and rehabilitative vision therapy began early in his career working with helping children who struggled with binocular vision problems and vision-related learning problems. He is a Board-Certified Fellow of the College of Optometrists in Vision Development (COVD) and lectures extensively on developmental vision, neuro-optometry, and vision therapy. Dr. Fortenbacher is a past examiner for the International Examination and Certification Board of COVD from 1999 to 2004. He has served in several leadership positions on the state and national level. He served as president of the international COVD in 2007-08. In 2020 Dr. Fortenbacher was the recipient of the G.N. Getman Award, Developmental Optometry’s highest lifetime achievement award for clinical excellence. Dr. Fortenbacher has developed models of innovation in the delivery of developmental, binocular and neuro-optometric vision rehabilitative care.

In addition to his private practice, Dr. Fortenbacher is also a clinical professor at the Michigan College of Optometry at Ferris State University and an adjunct faculty position at the Southern College of Optometry where he is the program supervisor for the Wow Vision Therapy and Rehabilitation Private Practice Residency.

Athletic success relies on the seamless integration of visual processing and cognitive function to enable peak performance. Optimizing visual-cognitive abilities may provide athletes with a competitive edge by improving focus, anticipation, and adaptability in high-pressure environments. This talk explores the evidence-base for visual-cognitive assessment and training techniques such as dynamic vision training, eye-tracking technology, neurofeedback, virtual-reality, and cognitive drills designed to enhance skills essential in sports. Topics include review of the current methodologies, scientific foundations, gaps and steps for improved rigor, and future directions in this emerging field. A specific self-reflective questionnaire is introduced that is designed to get athletes thinking about the role of vision, their own eyes, the steps that the take to activate vision for optimal performance, and vignettes that can be used to prepare for performance. 

 This lecture explores evidence-based optometric strategies for evaluating and treating visual field loss in adults with acquired brain injury. Emphasis is placed on functional rehabilitation approaches that improve visual performance, mobility, and quality of life in neurologically compromised patients. 

Accelerating Amblyopia Treatment Faster Than Ever Before - 

Amblyopia has traditionally been viewed as a monocular acuity deficit treated primarily with occlusion. Emerging research and clinical experience demonstrate that amblyopia is fundamentally a binocular neurodevelopmental disorder involving suppression, impaired stereopsis, and deficits in visuomotor performance. This lecture presents a clinical model for accelerating amblyopia recovery using structured binocular vision therapy, targeted suppression reduction, and patient engagement strategies that drive meaningful neuroplastic change. 

Eliminating Grocery Store Syndrome- PCS Visual Motion Sensitivity

Visual Motion Sensitivity—often called “Grocery Store Syndrome”—is a common but frequently misunderstood consequence of Post-Concussion Syndrome. This lecture explores how disrupted optic flow processing, peripheral motion suppression, and visual–vestibular integration contribute to sensory overload in visually complex environments. Attendees will learn a clinical framework for identifying key biomarkers and applying integrated neuro-optometric vision rehabilitation using both bottom-up stabilization and top-down neuroplastic training. 

Visual Memory, Visual Imagery, Visualization... Transferring to Executive Function Visual memory, visual imagery, and visualization represent a developmental hierarchy that supports higher-order cognitive abilities such as planning, organization, goal-directed attention, and task completion. This lecture explores how these visual–cognitive processes contribute to executive function and why they are often overlooked in vision therapy and neuro-optometric rehabilitation. Attendees will learn clinical strategies for evaluating and developing these skills so that vision therapy translates into meaningful real-world outcomes for patients with learning challenges, brain injury, and performance demands.