We will host the European Research Council's (ERC) Scientific Council meeting this June. Leading up to the visit, we’re highlighting some of the projects at Durham happening thanks to support from the ERC.
Professor Marko Nardini, from our Department of Psychology, has been granted ERC funding to dedicate five years to studying the capacity of the human brain to ‘plug into’ new senses.
Can people use new technology to improve their sense of their surroundings - potentially, helping blind people navigate more safely, or surgeons or firefighters to be sharper at work? How well can the adult brain learn to sense in new ways?
These are some of the questions NewSense, now in its fifth year, will try to answer.
Marko’s career researching the senses began over two decades ago, in the area of infant vision.
Later, he conducted studies on how children develop spatial awareness, as well as movement and navigation abilities.
He joined our Department of Psychology in 2013. With the help of several prestigious grants, he has pursued research on navigation and vision before developing NewSense.
Now, he manages a lab of researchers who seek to answer new questions about how we move through the world.
NewSense examines whether human perception can be enriched with the help of wearable technology. The project asks if, with enough of the right kind of training, our senses can be enhanced by tuning in to new kinds of information.
In one area of the project, people learn, in a virtual environment, to use sound to get better at air hockey. In another, they’re trained to use sound or wrist vibrations to measure distance.
Brain imaging, mathematical models, and interviews help the research team understand what it takes for perceptual abilities in these and other cases to be strengthened.
The project aims to help us understand how our senses work. It also has important implications for people experiencing sensory issues, as well as for people with high-risk jobs — like surgeons and firefighters — to have sharper perception.
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