Adaptability and plasticity of the human sensory systems

In this work, we present different examples of how the human brain is able to adapt its functionality to different sensory contexts and to a constantly changing world in an attempt to always maximize the efficiency of the information collected and to reduce ambiguities that could arise from the intrinsically vague sensory landscapes we often have to deal with. In our first study, we focus on the known cross-modal plasticity phenomena that occur with anomalous or missing sensory stimulation, when other senses are able to interact with the abnormal modality, with the aim of investigating the timescale and dynamics of these recalibration processes after a short period of monocular deprivation. In a second study, we investigate the extent to which the congruent tactile exploration can help bring to awareness an invisible grating. We make use of a visual stimulation technique that allows us to show that the visuo-haptic interaction occurs outside visual awareness. In a third study, we focus on the temporal dilation effect that occurs on duration judgements for moving objects compared to stationary objects. We make use of recent virtual reality tools to investigate the individual contributions of object motion as opposed to motion produce by the observer’s own motion in the environment, showing that the brain makes use of vestibular and proprioceptive signals to distinguish between these two types of motion, and to allow it to adaptively suppress self-generated motion.