Multisensory integration

IONS

The complementarity of those multiple sensory systems allows living systems to maximise the efficiency of their interaction with their surroundings. Being able to capture redundant sensory information allows us to build stronger representations and react faster to an event (eg hearing and seeing a car moving to the right; focusing on the lips while listening to a speaker in a cocktail party, etc..). However, how those separate senses seamlessly interact remains poorly understood. At the Institute of Neuroscience, researchers with multidisciplinary backgrounds use a variety of methods -from psychophysics, modelisation and neuroimaging- to better understand how the mind and brain implement our fascinating ability to optimally integrate/segregate multisensory information. 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. Importantly, we try to identify (and potentially rehabilitate) selective alterations of multisensory integration in people suffering from neuropsychiatric (e.g. alcoholism, autism, chronic pain) or sensory disorders (e.g. blind, deaf or Moebius).