Marina Bedny

Marina Bedny is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts & Sciences. Her research focuses on neuroplasticity and cognitive development, particularly how sensory experience shapes brain organization and conceptual understanding. Her lab investigates cortical plasticity in blind individuals, studying how 'visual' cortex regions repurpose for language, mathematics, and executive functions. She also examines conceptual development, exploring how blind and sighted individuals form abstract concepts like sight-related verbs or light phenomena.

Key research themes include:

• Cortical Plasticity: Functional reorganization of occipital cortex in blindness, including cross-modal processing and executive control functions.
• Conceptual Development: Role of sensory experience in forming knowledge about events (e.g., 'sparkling'), objects, and mental states.
• Developmental Mechanisms: Sensitive periods for neural specialization and the interplay between genes and environment.

Her lab’s recent work highlights functional flexibility in developing cortex, with studies demonstrating that visual deprivation leads to recruitment of occipital areas for higher-order cognition. Collaborative projects explore Braille reading neurobiology and computational models of semantic processing. Bedny mentors graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience, with active programs for undergraduate research assistants and blind/visually impaired summer interns.

Lab activities include:

• Summer research internships for blind/visually impaired students
• Undergraduate research assistantships (10+ hours/week commitment)
• Collaborations on neuroimaging (fMRI) and behavioral experiments

Bedny’s research has been published in Cerebral Cortex, Cognition, and NeuroImage, with a focus on bridging philosophical questions about the human mind with empirical neuroscience methods.