We study how people adapt to vision loss and restored sight, and how training, rehabilitation, and better outcome measures can improve everyday visual function.
Lily M. Turkstra
PhD CandidatePBS
Lily Turkstra is a PhD candidate in Psychological & Brain Sciences at UC Santa Barbara. She studies the human side of sight restoration, asking what happens after vision is restored and how people learn to make useful sense of artificial vision.
Her research examines how people who are blind use assistive technologies, how visual prosthesis users experience artificial vision in daily life, and how attention, engagement, and cognitive state shape performance. Her dissertation focuses on visual rehabilitation, including gamified training and neurofeedback, with the long-term goal of developing personalized approaches that help people make better use of restored vision.
Lily earned her B.S. in Psychology, with minors in Biology and Music, from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where she conducted psychoacoustic research in the Multisensory Perception Lab. Before beginning her PhD, she served as lab manager of the Bionic Vision Lab.
Outside of the lab, Lily enjoys tidepooling, playing bass, and biking around Santa Barbara.
Education
- PhD in Psychological & Brain Sciences UC Santa Barbara2023–2027 (expected)
- BS in Research Psychology California Polytechnic State University (CalPoly), San Luis Obispo, CA2022
Honors & Awards
- NEI Early Career Travel Grant Annual Meeting of the Vision Sciences Society (VSS), St. Pete’s Beach, FL (2024)
- Travel Grant Functional Vision & Accessibility (FVA), SKERI, San Francisco, CA (2023)
- Travel Grant The Eye & The Chip, Detroit, MI (2023)
In the News
Eye on Vision podcast features Lily Turkstra’s research on home-based assistive technology
In a recent episode of WYPL-FM’s Eye on Vision, PhD student Lily Turkstra discussed the findings of her recent Scientific Reports paper, which draws on 16 interviews to reveal how blind and low-vision individuals adapt instrumental daily tasks at home.
Publications
Evaluating closed-loop EEG feedback for simulated prosthetic vision in immersive VR: a sham-controlled feasibility study
We developed an EEG-guided neuroadaptive training platform for simulated prosthetic vision in immersive virtual reality and evaluated its feasibility in a sham-controlled object-localization task.
Ruyi Cao 
Lily M. Turkstra 
Adyah Rastogi 
Michael Beyeler
NeuroXR Workshop at IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct)
Actionable guidance outperforms map and compass cues in demanding immersive VR wayfinding
We compared three common guidance techniques for immersive VR wayfinding: a directional arrow, a minimap, and a compass.
Apurv Varshney Lily M. Turkstra 
Jiaxin Su Mable Zhou 
Scott T. Grafton 
Barry Giesbrecht 
Mary Hegarty Michael Beyeler
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) Special Issue on the 25th IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR)
Gamification enhances user engagement and task performance in prosthetic vision testing
We found that gamification can influence measured performance and user experience in prosthetic vision testing, but benefits are not universal and depend on task demands and cognitive load.
Lily M. Turkstra 
Byron A. Johnson Arathy Kartha Gislin Dagnelie Michael Beyeler
Translational Vision Science & Technology (TVST) 15(5):16
Assistive technology use in domestic activities by people who are blind In the News
We present insights from 16 semi-structured interviews with individuals who are either legally or completely blind, highlighting both the current use and potential future applications of technologies for home-based iADLs.
Lily M. Turkstra 
Tanya Bhatia Alexa Van Os Michael Beyeler
Scientific Reports
Aligning visual prosthetic development with implantee needs
Our interview study found a significant gap between researcher expectations and implantee experiences with visual prostheses, underscoring the importance of focusing future research on usability and real-world application.
Lucas Nadolskis Lily M. Turkstra Ebenezer Larnyo Michael Beyeler
Translational Vision Science & Technology (TVST) 13(28)
Beyond sight: Probing alignment between image models and blind V1 Spotlight Talk
We present a series of analyses on the shared representations between evoked neural activity in the primary visual cortex of a blind human with an intracortical visual prosthesis, and latent visual representations computed in deep neural networks.
Jacob Granley 
Galen Pogoncheff Alfonso Rodil Leili Soo Lily M. Turkstra Lucas Nadolskis Arantxa Alfaro Saez Cristina Soto Sanchez 
Eduardo Fernández Michael Beyeler
Workshop on Representational Alignment (Re-Align), ICLR ‘24
