Principal investigator
Nilsu Atilgan, PhD
Nilsu is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Bilkent University. She received her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Bilkent University and completed her PhD in Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the University of Minnesota. She then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University.
Her research focuses on reading and visual information processing, with experience spanning her doctoral work and her internship at Meta Reality Labs. Her projects have ranged from low-level visual perception and attentional mechanisms to optimizing reading parameters for individuals with low vision to improving text legibility in AR/VR systems.
Before joining Bilkent, Nilsu served as the Lead Scientist at The Readability Consortium, a research center based at the University of Florida, where she continues to contribute as a scientific consultant.
Master’s Students
Gül Teke
Gül is a Master’s student in Psychology with a research interest in the psychophysics of reading, particularly the visual processes underlying reading performance. Her current research investigates the relationship between visual span and dyslexia, with a focus on understanding how visual information processing may contribute to individual differences in reading ability.
Gülşah Tüzün
Gülşah is a first-year MSc student in Neuroscience, with research interests spanning developmental and clinical neuroscience, particularly visual perception, dyslexia, and reading. She is interested in understanding how cognitive processes develop and how they may be affected by neurological or developmental conditions.
Dilara Altuner
Dilara is currently in her scientific preparation year for the Neuroscience Master’s program at Bilkent University, working as part of the READ-Lab team. With a foundational background in Linguistics from Hacettepe University, she is deeply fascinated by speech perception, phonological processing, and dyslexia, exploring how the brain decodes speech sounds and language structures.
Undergraduate Research Assistants
Gülçin Yücel
Gülçin is a third-year undergraduate student majoring in psychology at Bilkent University. She is interested in language acquisition, cognitive development, and visual cognition. At READ-lab, she is conducting research on temporal crowding in relation to reading. She plans to pursue graduate-level research in cognitive/developmental psychology
Defne Baykal
Defne graduated from the Psychology Department at Bilkent University with a minor in Graphic Design. She is currently formulating her research on visual search and dyslexia. Her research interests are user experience, design, neuromarketing, and cognitive psychology.
Işık Tanışman
She is particularly interested in the intersection of cognitive and developmental psychology, with a focus on language and reading development. Her research interests include how cognitive processes such as phonological awareness, language processing, attention, working memory, and executive functions influence children’s language and reading skills. She is also interested in neurodevelopmental differences (including dyslexia, amusia, developmental language disorder, and so on) and their relationship with language, reading, and cognition. Her interests also extend to empathy and moral development in children.
Öykü Ünyazıcı
Öykü is a third-year undergraduate psychology student at Bilkent University. She is interested in cognitive processes and reading difficulties. At READ-lab, she is currently engaged in research examining the role of temporal crowding in the reading process. She aims to continue her academic work in cognitive psychology in the future.
Hilal Gün
Hilal is a third-year Economics student at Bilkent University. Her lab research focuses on visual search, visual information processing, and dyslexia. Hilal plans to pursue a Master’s degree in neuroscience. Her research interests are neuroeconomics, cognitive economics, and neuropsychology.
Burak Önemli
Burak is a third-year psychology student at Bilkent University with a minor in Information Systems and Technologies. His research interests focus on the neural mechanisms and computational modeling of visual and auditory perception. He is currently assisting with research on amusia
Collaborators
• Yingzi Xiong, Johns Hopkins University, USA
• Gordon Legge, University of Minnesota, USA
• Ben D. Sawyer, University of Central Florida, USA
• Sheng He, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
• Aurélie Calabrèse, Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, France
• Meltem Karaca, Assumption University, USA
• Nazbanou Nozari, Carnegie Mellon University, USA