Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour
McMaster Integrative Neuroscience Discovery & Study



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Lux Li





Contact:
PC 332 / ext. 28624
lil54@mcmaster.ca

I am a graduate student in Dr. Daniel Goldreich's Tactile Research Lab. I received an Hon. B.Sc. in Psychology with a Minor in Mathematics & Statistics from McMaster University in 2010.

Research:
Broadly speaking, I am interested in the interface between sensation and perception. Our brain perceives the world amid sensory uncertainty, because sensorineural activity imprecisely represents the physical environment and provides often ambiguous information. How the brain interprets ambiguous information from the senses and translates it into meaningful perception is what I aim to examine. Research has suggested that the brain takes advantage of prior knowledge to enhance perceptual resolution, a process that could be neatly modelled in terms of the Bayesian inference framework.

The Bayesian inference perceptual model views perception as a series of unconscious Bayesian inferences: the brain automatically incorporates prior expectations with present sensorineural activities to generate the most probable posterior perceptual image. This inferential process helps the brain to compensate for sensorineural imprecision; however, when prior expectations are violated by rare physical events, the inferential process could lead to perceptual illusions.

My current project pertains to tactile adaptation and the perceptual illusions it induces. Adaptation-induced spatial and orientational illusions such as the tilt after effects have been extensively studied in vision, but they are rarely investigated and poorly understood in the tactile modality.  Tactile illusions provide cues about how the brain expects and interprets tactile information presented by sensorineural activities as the brain adapts to previous tactile stimuli. Using psychophysical experimentation and Bayesian modelling, I hope to unpack tactile illusions and to tackle the sensorineural encoding and decoding processes that underlie tactile adaptation.

Before I joined the Tactile Research Lab, I did my undergraduate Honours thesis in Dr. Bruce Milliken's Attention & Memory Lab. I examined how selective attention can qualitatively alter perceptual priming effects through modulating episodic memory retrieval and integration. I also conducted independent studies in Dr. William Sulis' Collective Intelligence Lab and in Dr. Allison Sekuler's Vision and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab.