About the Lab
The Yau Lab at ÌÇÐÄÊÓƵ of Medicine investigates how we sense and perceive the world. We use touch as a model system to study how sensory cues are represented and elaborated in the primate nervous system.
Our sensory experience is complex and involves the integration of multisensory information over time and space. Understanding how the brain encodes and filters the myriad sensory signals we encounter into cognitively tractable representations is a fundamental challenge in systems neuroscience.
Although we receive signals in each modality through specialized receptor systems, the environmental information conveyed by our senses is often overlapping or redundant. Conceivably, the brain has developed common strategies and shared mechanisms for representing tactile, visual, and auditory information.
The aims of our lab are to identify perceptual and neural processing principles that unify our senses and to characterize the complex interactions between the sensory systems. We investigate the relationship between the brain and behavior using functional neuroimaging, noninvasive brain stimulation, computational modeling, and psychophysics.