Matt Dye - Featured Faculty 2017

His PhD in Psychology was awarded in 2001 by the University of Southampton, where he conducted psycholinguistic research on British Sign Language. Moving to the United States in 2002, Dr. Dye completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at The University of Rochester and then spent six years on the faculty at the University of Illinois before moving to RIT/NTID in 2015.

Since moving to the US, Dr. Dye’s work has focused on whether being born deaf means that you see better. His “deaf x lab” conducts research on brain reorganization in the face of altered sensory input, asking what happens to the brain areas and neural pathways associated with visual and multi-sensory processing when auditory input is missing. Most of his research looks at selective visual attention in deaf individuals, asking whether their greater reliance upon visual information means that their perceptual and cognitive systems are better able to select and process visual information. The lab’s working hypothesis is that this is indeed the case, especially when operating in environments where one would typically benefit from the integration of auditory and visual information, such as when monitoring peripheral vision. His research program now also includes temporal aspects of visual attention in deaf children, with an ongoing national longitudinal study funded by the National Science Foundation and a large scale study of sequence processing and neuroplasticity in deaf and hard-of-hearing college students funded by NIH.

The long-term goal of Dr. Dye’s research program is to inform effective intervention and educational approaches for deaf and hard-of-hearing children that play to their strengths and promote their linguistic, cognitive, and social health.

Matt Dye
Senior Lecturer
RIT National Technical Institute For the Deaf