PsySuite: An android application designed to perform multimodal psychophysical testing.

In behavioral sciences, there is growing concern about the inflation of false-positive rates due to the amount of under-powered studies that have been shared in the past years. While problematic, having the possibility to recruit (lots of) participants (for a lot of time) is realistically not achievable for many research facilities. Factors that hinder the reaching of optimal sample sizes are, to name but a few, research costs, participants' availability and commitment, and logistics.

Computational modeling of human multisensory spatial representation by a neural architecture.

Our brain constantly combines sensory information in unitary percept to build coherent representations of the environment. Even though this process could appear smooth, integrating sensory inputs from various sensory modalities must overcome several computational issues, such as recoding and statistical inferences problems. Following these assumptions, we developed a neural architecture replicating humans' ability to use audiovisual spatial representations.

Deaf individuals use compensatory strategies to estimate visual time events.

Temporal perception is so profoundly linked to hearing that congenitally and early deaf individuals appear to experience visual temporal impairments. However, most studies investigated visual temporal perception in deaf individuals using static stimuli, while ecological objects with which we interact in everyday life often move across space and time. Given that deafness does not impact spatial metric representations, we hypothesize that, while the temporal perception of static stimuli is altered after early hearing loss, it can be enhanced by providing additional, ecologically relevant information.

The development of adaptation aftereffects in the vibrotactile domain.

Sensory adaptation is a feature-specific modulation of neural responses and is potentially fundamental to maximizing perceptual sensitivity. Despite its function being unclear, it has been hypothesized that sensory adaptation modifies the neurons' response codes, increasing the ability to process sensory signals on a larger scale. To better understand how such flexibility of our brain is possible, we investigated the effect of high- and low-frequency vibrotactile adaptation on perceived tactile temporal frequency during childhood, a time known for the brain to experience varying levels of plasticity.

Distortions of visual time induced by motor adaptation.

As perception of time is fundamental for action planning and execution, we investigated how action distorts the perception of visual duration. Participants adapted to tapping in midair for a few seconds, either slowly or quickly, then judged the relative duration of 2 drifting gratings, 1 spatially coincident with the tapped region and the other in the opposite field. Fast tapping decreased apparent duration in the tapping region while slow tapping increased it.