Research
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Multisensory integration for body
The experiences that body parts are owned (body ownership) and localized in space (body localization) are two key aspects of body awareness. I investigated whether the process underlying body awareness in the brain is shared for these two aspects. I found separate visual-proprioceptive integration processes for ownership and localization of body parts.
Matsumiya K: Separate multisensory integration processes for ownership and localization of body parts. Scientific Reports, 9:652, DOI:10.1038/s41598-018-37375-z, 2019. -
Visual stability during eye movements
Eye movements cause the image of the visual world to shift on the retina, intermittently disrupting retinal image stability. Despite this instability, we perceive the visual world as stable. How does the visual system achieve visual stability when retinal images are frequently displaced by saccadic eye movements? Recently, we found that changes in luminance, or transient signals, play a critical role in visual stability across saccadic eye movements.
Matsumiya K, Sato M, Shioiri S: Contrast dependence of saccadic blanking and landmark effects. Vision Research, 129, 1-12, 2016. -
Body awarenss and visual space
We manipulate various objects with our hands. Perceiving the visual space around our hand has been suggested to be important for object manipulation. However, it remained unknown how the ability to perceive the visual space around the hand works. Our study provided the first psychophysical evidence that bodily self-consciousness generates the perceptual representaion of the visual space encoded in body-part-centered coordinates.
Matsumiya K, Shioiri S: Moving one’s own body part induces a motion aftereffect anchored to the body part. Current Biology, 24(2), 165-169, 2014. -
Visual-haptic face perception
I found that our sense of touch can contribute to our ability to perceive faces. The findings suggest that facial information may be coded in a shared representation between vision and haptics in the brain. Current views on face processing assume that the visual system only receives facial signals from the visual modality, but these experiments suggest that face perception is truly crossmodal.
Matsumiya K: Seeing a haptically explored face: visual facial-expression aftereffect from haptic adaptation to a face. Psychological Science, 24(10), 2088-2098, 2013.