​Neuroscience and Behaviour Laboratory

Our laboratory studies how sensory events in the environment are processed by the nervous system to generate perceptions and drive behaviour. We are particularly interested in classes of sensory events that are central to the study of pain, surprise, urgent behaviour, and peripersonal space.

Although human cortical electrophysiology has been the core methodology of the lab, we are not tied any single experimental approach. Instead, we like to choose the most appropriate species (e.g. humans, monkeys, mice) and measurement technique (e.g. electrophysiology, magnetic resonance imaging, kinematics) to address the scientific question at hand.

Pain & Nociception

A central focus of the lab has been to understand nociception - the neural processing of potentially harmful bodily stimuli - and its relationship to pain. We have demonstrated that the largest part of the brain activity elicited by sudden nociceptive stimuli does not reflect the functioning of neurons generating painful percepts, but rather the detection of any environmental event that may require urgent behaviour. This work has contributed to reframing the interpretation of the so-called ‘pain matrix’ as a more general system for responding to salient environmental stimuli. This shift had clear implication for narrowing the search for more specific pain biomarkers, such as high frequency cortical oscillations.

Surprise & Salience

How the nervous system recognises and responds to sudden and surpsising events in the environment has since become another main focus of the laboratory. For example, abrupt changes such as a rapid shift in sound pitch elicit a short-lasting and large thalamocortical responses – the vertex potential – that interrupt and modulate ongoing activity across motor and sensory brain systems, to facilitate rapid responses to threats and affordances in the sensory environment. These responses are not epiphenomenal but serve a functional role, facilitating rapid behavioural adjustments to threats and opportunities in the sensory environment.

Two-system theory

Our recent two-system theory of sensory-evoked brain responses proposes that the cortical responses elicited by most sensory stimuli reflects the mixed contribution of two pathways: high-fidelity, modality-specific ‘lemniscal’ thalamo-cortical projections to primary sensory cortices, and non-modality-specific ‘extralemniscal’ thalamo-cortical projections. The relative contribution of these two systems varies depending on both bottom-up stimulus properties and contextual factors. Recognising this distinction is critical, as the role of the extralemniscal system is often overlooked, leading to modality-specific interpretations of brain responses that may be incomplete or misleading.

Peripersonal Space & Action Value

We also investigate stimuli that elicit responses in neurons that respond more when objects are near the body (peripersonal neurons), as well as with defensive behaviours such as the hand-blink reflex (HBR), whose magnitude depends on the hand–face distance. We have shown that that these neurons do not simply act as proximity detectors. Instead, they map onto behaviour by signalling the value of potential actions (such as en eye blink) that could result in rewards or punishments from objects contacting the body. Together, these action-value neurons naturally develop in AI agents and form egocentric value maps - a predictive model of the near-body environment that integrates sensory input with motor affordances. This work places peripersonal space within a broader systems-neuroscience framework, bridging theories of sensory coding, action selection, and predictive processing.