Crossmodal perception and plasticity (CPP-Lab)

Humans and other animals have a brain that has been shaped by evolution to process and integrate information from different sensory organs, each capturing different form of energies in the environment. How does this diversity of sensory information affect how people represent the world? Where in the brain are the different sensory information combined? How do we represent in our mind and brain something that we can see, hear, feel and smell ? Does the brain implement represention that go beyond the sensory experience we have of things?  

The presence of these different sensory systems also paves the way for considerable flexibility by allowing perceptual, cognitive, or brain systems to supplement another following sensory deprivation. Part of our research is driven by the strong conviction that the study of sensory deprived individuals (blind, deaf, anosmic, Moebius) represents an excellent model to probe how the brain develops, maintains, and changes its functional tuning to adapt its interaction with the environment. What happens when one or more of these senses is lost or never developed? Research at the CPP-lab investigates the relationship between a brain that is intrinsically multisensory and how sensory deprivation influence these entangled sensory networks.   

Sensory deprivation is also used to causally test the role of sensory experience in how we represent information in our mind. The goal is to establish which aspects of cognition and perception are fundamentally shaped by our sensory experience and which are abstracted from sensory experience and/or mostly relying on language. To do so, we are also developing studies in babies to understand how the mind and brain develop their functional architecture. 

Our work relies on the respective advantages of a plurality of methods (Psychophysics, EEG/MEG, stereotactic-EEG, TMS, fMRI) to converge toward a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms underlying crossmodal perception and plasticity. This coordinated approach has been successfully used to reveals fundamentals of how the mind and brain integrate and segregate sensory information in various populations and how the intrinsic multisensory scaffolding of brain networks constrains the expression of cross modal plasticity in sensory deprived people.