Centre for the Study of the Senses (CenSes)

Description

The CenSes pioneers collaborative sensory research across disciplines, drawing on the work of philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and anthropologists, connecting groups of researchers from different fields and sectors who can benefit from one another's results.

The overall aim is to achieve a coherent framework to accommodate the welter of recent findings that have revised the understanding of how the different senses contribute to perception of the environment and self-awareness. New discoveries have revealed how the senses as traditionally conceived are not so independent of one another as was once thought, and much work is being carried out on cross-modal effects and multisensory integration. However, as yet, there is no underlying theory or conceptual framework in which to house the numerous findings. Such a foundational approach to sensory perception can only be carried out by well-informed researchers working in a wide-scale and interdisciplinary way. Their aim is to make this possible by setting up a number of sub-groups investigating key issues, including:

• how different senses are integrated and how they influence one another (cross-modal integration and influence);
• sense of agency and bodily ownership; the special nature of the chemical senses;
• the objects of perception across different sensory systems;
• the nature of sensory deficits, sensory substitutions, and sensory extensions;
• how and to what extent cognition is involved in different sensory systems (cognitive penetration);
• the individuation of the senses.

They fund workshops in these areas to encourage networks for further interactions, and once a year they hold a major conference to bring together the results from each group to ensure cross-fertilization. The outcome is a comprehensive account of the nature of sensory systems and the role of particular senses in perception.

The Centre for the Study of the Senses has an international Scientific Board comprising philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. Their aim is to foster interdisciplinary research on the senses by identifying research groupings to pursue specialized topics of benefit to the participating disciplines.

They have recently been awarded an AHRC large grant. The research grant will support a three-year project based at the Institute's Centre for the Study of the Senses (CenSes) – in collaboration with the universities of Glasgow, Oxford, and Warwick – exploring sensory experience. Collaborators from a variety of institutions, such as the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, and partners such as Tate Galleries will also be supporting the project.

As part of the Centre for the Study of the Senses, the Institute runs a Forum: a series of seminars covering recent philosophical and neuroscientific research on the nature of sensory systems, covering aspects such as, but not limited to, multisensory integration and cross-modal influences, sense of agency and bodily ownership, the objects of perception, sensory deficits, sensory extensions, and sensory substitutions, the cognitive penetrability and individuation of the senses.

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No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

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University of London
London