“But the various senses incidentally perceive each other’s objects, not as so many separate senses, but as forming a single sense, when there is concurrent perception relating to the same object.”
-Aristotle, de Anima
The questions of how our brain constructs a unified perceptual experience from the myriad of sensory signals in our environment has long intrigued and baffled scientist: from ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (1, 2), Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer (3, transl.), to modern-day psychologist Anne Treisman (4) and neuroscientist Wolf Singer (5).
I am Aaron, a neuroscientist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Rochester under the supervision of Dr. Edmund Lalor. My current research focuses on how the brain tracks the correlation between sensory signals over time, how that signal changes sensory processing, how that change modifies our perceptual experience, and how how that manifests in behavior. More broadly, I’m interested in how selective attention influences binding (and vice-versa) and how it may guide the development of our statistical representation of our multisensory environment. My research combines behavior, computational models, and electroencephalography (EEG) with a combination of well-controlled complex stimuli and more naturalistic stimuli such as human speech to investigate these questions.
I came to Rochester from Nashville, Tennessee; I received my PhD in Hearing and Speech Sciences from Vanderbilt University in the lab of Dr. Mark Wallace. I also have a BS in Neuroscience from King College (now King University) in Bristol, Tennessee.
Aaron Nidiffer 