While the traditional importance of the sensory system lies in its ability to perceive external information about the world, emerging discoveries suggest that sensory perception has a greater impact on health and longevity than was previously appreciated. These effects are conserved across species. In this mini-review, we discuss the specific sensory cues that have been identified to significan...

Agents acting in the natural world aim at selecting appropriate actions based on noisy and partial sensory observations. Many behaviors leading to decision making and action selection in a closed loop setting are naturally phrased within a control theoretic framework. Within the framework of optimal Control Theory, one is usually given a cost function which is minimized by selecting a control l...

To model realistic biological behaviors such as perception and motor interactions, one requires a flexible simulation environment in which goal-oriented action and sensory perception can be integrated to produce intelligent behavior. Many researchers have focused their work primarily on one specific aspect of this loop of action and perception. Our challenge is to demonstrate a feasible environ...

The brain constructs representations of objects and concepts based in sensory information combined with experience. This mental process, that we call perception, is the result of a chain of events consisting of phenomena such as detection, memory, discrimination, categorization and decision-making. Although the phenomenon of perception is not necessarily dependent on a given sensory modality (e...

It is commonly assumed that neural systems efficiently process natural sensory input. However, the mechanisms by which such efficient processing is achieved, and the consequences for perception and behaviour remain poorly understood. Here we show that small conductance calcium-activated potassium (SK) channels enable efficient neural processing and perception of natural stimuli. Specifically, t...

Hallucinations occur in both normal and clinical populations. Due to their unpredictability and complexity, the mechanisms underlying hallucinations remain largely untested. Here we show that visual hallucinations can be induced in the normal population by visual flicker, limited to an annulus that constricts content complexity to simple moving grey blobs, allowing objective mechanistic investi...

Situated and embodied reactive agents solve relatively complex tasks by coordinating action and perception. Reactive agents are generally believed to be incapable of coping with identical sensory states that require different responses (i.e., perceptual ambiguity). In contrast to reactive agents, non-reactive agents can cope with perceptual ambiguity by storing and integrating sensory informati...

Ageing is associated with declines in both perception and cognition. We review evidence for an interaction between perceptual and cognitive decline in old age. Impoverished perceptual input can increase the cognitive difficulty of tasks, while changes to cognitive strategies can compensate, to some extent, for impaired perception. While there is strong evidence from cross-sectional studies for ...

We believe in the potential of augmenting reality for increasing human perception to overcome shortcomings of interface technology, such as material, surface structure or form factor. Current interfaces, for example, displays and touch-based surfaces, do not provide same degree of information as human sensory, like vision and touch. As sensory illusion can result in perception of information th...

What has transpired immediately before has a strong influence on how sensory stimuli are processed and perceived. In particular, temporal context can have contrastive effects, repelling perception away from the interpretation of the context stimulus, and attractive effects (TCEs), whereby perception repeats upon successive presentations of the same stimulus. For decades, scientists have documen...