Sensory Neuroscience Research
About Sensory Neuroscience Research
The Sensory Neuroscience group works on the mechanisms underlying sensory perception, with the object of developing prostheses to facilitate navigation, reading and ultimately vision for the blind. This group is headed by Dr Richard Vickery and Prof John Morley.
Research Themes
The world we experience arises from peripheral receptors that transform the environment into patterns of small electrical impulses in our nerve cells. We study the way this information is encoded by recording simultaneously in different cortical regions to analyse how this information is processed in a recursively-connected sensory network. These data form the experimental underpinning for the development of a prosthetic limb that can provide sense information to its user, and the development of a bionic eye where a camera can replace the input of a diseased eye and send electrical signals directly to retinal ganglion cells or even the visual cortex. Our major techniques include human behavioural experiments, as well as direct recordings from individual nerve cells in animals made by inserting microelectrode arrays into the brain.
Major Researchers