University College of London, UK

Supervisor: P. Haggard

Research in this section focuses on the effects of attention on perception, the fate of unattended information, and the degree to which attention is coordinated across different sensory modalities. A second stream of research deals with the control of voluntary action and tries to understand the relation between the brain activity in the frontal and parietal lobes that precedes movements, and the conscious experience of controlling our own movements. Finally, a further topic relates to body perception, focusing on the body as a multimodal object which integrates visual, tactile and proprioceptive sources of information. One theoretical question concerns how these sources of information are combined to give a coherent bodily self. These issues are approached by using a convergence of methods, ranging from psychophysical to neurophysiological studies, and including event related potentials (ERPs), positron emission tomography (PET), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).