H2020-MSCA-RISE-2016 - Platypus

PLAsticiTY of Perceptual space Under Sensorimotor interactions

PLATYPUS is a European Commission funded consortium of researchers from universities and industry in Australia, Europe and the United States. PLATYPUS stands for PLAsticiTY of Perceptual space Under Sensorimotor interactions. We are funded under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange action. We are working together to understand how we perceive the spatial relationship between ourselves and the objects in the world around us. We know that we generally perceive space as continuous and uniform. Experiments on the other hand, reveal that the brain processes space as a dynamic property that can distort and even become discontinuous. Our own actions are often the cause of distortions in our brain’s representation of space.  In particular, our eye movements are a leading cause of such distortions. Moreover, we make up three of these eye movements every second. How we transform this constantly distorting representation of space into our continuous and uniform awareness of space is the key focus of the PLATYPUS consortium. The ultimate outcome of our research will be increased understanding of the continuously updating neural construction of space and the production of assistive technologies for people needing corrective lenses, with ocular or visual discontinuity and for the growing virtual reality industry. Space is the foundational characteristic of visual perception and we generally perceive it as continuous and uniform.