Thanks to generous funding from the National Science Foundation, we held our first Summer Undergraduate Workshop in Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the University of Delaware. We had a diverse, talented group of twenty undergraduates from around the nation here to learn about topics including vision, infant cognition, social neuroscience, language, replicability, neuropsychology, and more.  More information about the workshop can be found here, and we are looking forward to holding our next undergraduate workshop in Summer 2018.

The lab has just returned from the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego, where we presented a poster on changes in tactile processing after numbing the lips – part of a collaboration with Elisabetta Ambron and H. Branch Coslett at the University of Pennsylvania.

After that, it was straight to Boston for the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society.  Both Yuqi and I gave talks at the Tactile Research Group satellite meeting.  Her talk was on frames of reference in multisensory integration, while mine was on error patterns in tactile localization after stroke.  Then, Yuqi had a talk on multisensory integration and the mirror box illusion.  Feel free to e-mail me if you want to learn more about these projects.

Our department has just been awarded a $6 million dollar grant from the NSF (PI: Medina) to study the relationship between cognition and perception! These funds will be used to support graduate education and infrastructure improvements in cognitive neuroscience at UD. Read more about the grant in the following press release.

We’ve co-edited a special issue of Cognitive Neuropsychology on body representations. This includes several interesting articles, including one authored by myself and H. Branch Coslett (U Penn) on what error patterns can tell us about body representations

I really enjoyed my visit to Beijing Normal University, where I gave a talk on using evidence from brain-damaged individuals to study how the mind represents the body.  Then we traveled to Suzhou for the 17th International Multisensory Research Forum.  Yuqi presented her research on the mirror box illusion, and I gave a talk on body model representations.

I had a great time in Dublin at the UK Synaesthesia Association conference on Synaesthesia and Cross-modal Perception, where I gave a talk on interactions between mirror touch synesthesia and the body schema.

We have been awarded a pilot grant from the Delaware Center for Translational Research. We will use fMRI to examine somatosensory plasticity in individuals with brain damage due to stroke.

Simon Fischer-Baum (Rice) and I led a symposium on “Single-case cognitive neuropsychology in the 21st century” at the European Workshop on Cognitive Neuropsychology in Bressanone, Italy.  We had a great group of speakers, including Michael McCloskey (Johns Hopkins), Tim Shallice (SISSA), Danny Dilks (Emory) and Marina Laganaro (University of Geneva).

Our paper describing a peculiar case of crossmodal synchiria is now out in Neuropsychologia.  In it, we describe a case study who report seeing visual stimuli on both sides when presented with a visual stimulus on the ipsilesional side.  Interestingly, this deficit occurs primarily when a) the visual stimulus is brief (<250 msec) and b) when visual stimuli are presented on her hands (versus off her hands).  It’s a very interesting case study – please read!

Our paper on embodiment and multisensory integration using the mirror box illusion is now out in Consciousness and Cognition. In it, we use the mirror box illusion to examine the relationship between measures of embodiment and multisensory integration.