Principal Investigator: Dr. Philip Servos Research Summary:
Research in the Perception Lab seeks to understand how the human
brain represents the sensory world. Dr. Servos’ focuses on two
of the senses: touch and vision. Understanding how perception
arises in the brain might seem relatively trivial given how
effortlessly we make use of it throughout the day. It feels like
the brain acts as a mirror of the sensory information arriving
to our brain, but this analogy is flawed – what, in the end, is
‘looking’ at the mirror? It is a highly complex network of
hundreds of millions of brain cells that work together to allow
us such a rich representation of the world. Experiments in the
Perception Lab are aimed at understanding how these complicated
networks of brain cells allow humans to represent the worlds of
touch and vision. We conduct behavioural experiments
investigating how the touch and visual systems process shape and
motion information. We also investigate various illusions in
these two senses because quit