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Sensory Perception Lab
Research Overview
Our
Research Focus
Our research focuses on how we process sensory information form the outside world, and how this impacts our cognitive functioning and the way that we interact with the external world. Much of our work focuses on differences in perception in some groups, such as neurodiverse people and cochlear implant users, impacts cognitive processes.
Perceptual Binding
Basic Research in Multisensory Integration and Perception
Our sensory systems are constantly inundated with information from the outside world. The human nervous system has evolved to be able to take that sensory information and convert it into neural representations that are then used in our every day cognitive functions and interactions with the world. One critical step in these processes is referred to as perceptual binding, or the process of merging individual bits of sensory information into coherent representations.
A similar process of perceptual binding occurs during audition. When your friend speaks, your brain automatically perceptually binds the individual sounds that she utters into coherent, meaningful segments that you perceive as words. In fact, this process of perceptual binding occurs across our senses as well. Following this example, when you see and hear your friend talking to you, your brain automatically puts together her mouth movements with they sounds that are coming out of her mouth, and you simply perceive your friend talking.
While this is an effortless process for you, the underlying neural computations that are needed to actually perform this task are quite complex. Furthermore, your brain must determine what to perceptually bind and what to not perceptually bind. In the middle of a noisy, crowded room, how do your sensory systems know to integrate your friends voice with her mouth movements as opposed to the mouth movements of the man that is talking next to her?
For example, when you look at a friend’s face, the information that arrives and is processed at early visual areas of your brain include the individual contours, contrasts, and colours. But this is not what you perceive – instead, you simply perceive her face. To arrive at this unified perception of a face, your brain has merged individual contrasts and contours into facial features such as the eyes, nose, and mouth, and subsequently combined these features into a single, perceptually bound percept of your friend’s face.
Our research aims to study how the brain takes sensory inputs and puts them together into a coherent, meaningful perception of the world that can then be used to successfully interact with that world. This line of research includes a number of questions that we are attempting to answer including, but not limited to:
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What sensory information is used to determine which inputs are perceptually bound and which are not?
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What are the underlying neural mechanisms that support these processes?
Research Questions
For example, in the visual realm and perceptual binding, face perception is a common example of this. When you see a face, you don’t see two eyes and ears, a nose and a mouth, you simply ‘see’ the face as a whole. We are not born knowing that these elements make up a face though, so how is it that we come to know this.
Research Questions
The above example, leads to our first developmental research question:
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What is the developmental trajectory of perceptual binding, and how does the developing brain ‘learn’ to integrate sensory inputs both within sensory modalities (e.g. vision or audition) and across sensory modalities (e.g. audiovisual)?
Our labs research questions concerning statistical perceptual learning include:
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What pieces of sensory information drive the ability to learn how to associate auditory and visual information?
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Does the ability of statistical learning change throughout development?
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Can we harness the power of statistical learning to improve an individual’s ability to perceive the world?
Development
How Multisensory Perceptual Abilities
Develops Across The Lifespan
At the time of birth, a child’s sensory experience is very limited. Throughout development, however, children’s ability to perceive the world around them develops at an incredible rate, allowing for them to learn a host of new skills. Just how this perceptual development takes place is one area of research in our lab.
One area of perception that is learned throughout development is the ability to perceptually bind sensory information. Perceptual binding is essentially the ability to take two or more pieces of sensory information and integrate them into a single perception.
One possible mechanism that our lab is currently investigating is statistical learning. Even though we may not be consciously aware of it, our sensory systems are continuously monitoring our environment and evolving a sense of how things usually are. Sensory systems can then use this information to predict what the environment will be like in the future, and allow us to perceive the world more efficiently. This process is called statistical learning, and it is one of the most powerful forms of learning during development.
Cognitive Processing
The Relationship Between Sensory Processing
and Cognitive Function
One of the primary functions of the human brain is to take information from the external world and make sense of it so that we can successfully interact with our environments. Many of the early steps in this process involve creating perceptions of the world based on sensory information. These perceptions are early building blocks for nearly all higher-level cognitive processes such as memory or language.This example extends to almost all cognitive processes.
Successful social communications relies on your ability to perceive the visual and auditory information from the person with whom you are conversing. Walking down a hallway relies on your ability to see objects in the hallway that you must walk around. While the lower-level sensory perception aspects of these tasks are often taken for granted, they are integral to our daily cognitive functioning.
Using memory as an example, if you ask someone to remember a particular colour, their memory of the colour is going to be based on their visual perception of what they saw. Even though the wavelengths of light that hit both of your retinas were identical, if you perceived the colour differently, you will remember it differently. In the extreme case of this example, if you are colour blind, then your memory of the colour will be very different indeed.
Our lab’s research in this area focuses on how visual and auditory perception influence high-order cognitive processing. This includes, but is not limited to:
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How do individual differences in perception influence performance on higher-level tasks such as speech perception and memory?
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How do perceptual difficulties in clinical populations, such as Autism and hearing loss, influence an individual’s ability to perform these cognitive functions?
Research Questions
One aspect we are particularly interested in, as with the overall focus of the lab, is the ability to integrate, or perceptually bind, sensory information. In other cases, such as the ability to integrate what is seen and heard, autistic individuals may have difficulties. For example, in many ways, autistic individuals show intact or even enhanced sensory processing abilities, particularly when focusing on the components, or details of a visual scene.
Research Questions
Our current research investigates:
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What is the underlying nature of the differences in sensory processing observed in ASD?
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What areas show sensory difficulties, and likewise, what processes show sensory enhancements?
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Most importantly, how do sensory processing differences impact social communication, repetitive behaviours, and cognition in autistic populations?
Differences in Perception
In Clinical Populations and How These Differences
Affect Symptomatology
Some of the clinical populations we look at include, but are not limited to, autism spectrum disorder, cochlear implant users, schizophrenia, and ADHD.
Our lab’s strongest clinical focus is on sensory processing in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Autistic individuals often report atypical sensory perception, usually in the form of hyper- or hypo-sensitivity. We are currently exploring how sensory processing differences in ASD may impact the daily lives of autistic individuals, from social communication to cognition.
Our lab also looks at how we can harness individuals perceptual learning abilities to improve upon areas of sensory processing difficulty in autistic individuals. Specifically, we test volunteers on a number of tasks before and after a perceptual learning paradigm, which allows us to measure both the perceptual, behavioural, and neural impacts of the training paradigm. Our end goal is to create novel remediation strategies that will have the ability to not only improve sensory processing in autistic individuals, but to also improve the higher-level processes that rely on sensory processing, such as social communication, in autistic children and adults.
Interested in participating in our research?
There are several ways you can contribute to our research:
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To be a Research Participant, fill out the form (https://uwo.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_aWUluMlJDSsYFfL) on the right.
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Follow us on Instagram (@sprlab) or Facebook (@SensoryPerceptionLab) where we update our current study opportunities.
For more information, visit our Participate section on our website for more information about how to sign-up or other ways of contributing to our research!