Simon Lacey, PhD

Dr. Simon Lacey manages the lab of Dr. Krishnankutty "Krish" Sathian, which employs both psychophysical and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in an ongoing research program with the ultimate goal of a better understanding of the meta-modal brain organized around task-based regions that receive multisensory inputs. This is in contrast to the old orthodoxy of the brain as organized around discrete unisensory regions whose task-related outputs are generated elsewhere.

The lab is interested in interactions between different sensory modalities in perception and mental imagery; how aspects of cognition, for example, language processing or music perception, may be grounded in sensory processes; and how perception and imagery may be modulated by sensory loss or impairment (e.g., in the congenitally, early- and/or late-blind) and in special populations (e.g., in synesthesia or in musicians).

Current interests in the lab include understanding the underlying mechanisms and neural basis of synesthesia and crossmodal correspondences; individual differences in mental imagery and object recognition in different modalities; the contribution of sound-symbolic crossmodal correspondences to language; metaphor processing; neuroesthetics; and multisensory processing in neurodegenerative disease.