The Active Touch Laboratory uses methods in psychophysics, computational modelling, and robotics to investigate tactile sensing in people and intelligent machines.
We are based at the University of Sheffield in the Department of Psychology. We are also affiliated with Sheffield Robotics, INSIGNEO Institute for in silico Medicine, and the Neuroscience Institute.
Our research is funded by the European Union, the Leverhulme Trust the Medical Research Council, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
How do the mechanical properties of the skin affect neural coding? Our research aims to uncover how mechanical contact events propagate through the skin, both on a coarse and a small scale, and then drive individual mechanoreceptor responses.
We build large-scale models that simulate population responses from thousands of mechanoreceptive afferents innervating the hand or the foot. These models can help investigate neural coding on the population level and are employed in neuroprosthetic and robotics applications.
Using computational models ranging from the abstract to the detailed, we explore how touch is represented in the brain. We also investigate how these representations can adapt over time and how they might shape perception.
James re-joins the lab as a PhD student working on the mechanics of touch in the fingertip.
01/10/2023eLife published a great summary of our recent reviewed preprint: Scientists decipher the fingertip's 'memory'
04/07/2023We're presenting our work at the Festival of Touch in Marseille (Laura, Luke, Hannes) and the World Haptics conference in Delft (Giulia, Luke, Hannes).
12/06/2023Mia and Dimitris are starting their SURE funded summer projects in the lab.
06/02/2023Three CCN MSc students are joining the lab for their dissertation work. Welcome Raj, James, and Wen-Pu!
30/01/2023Our new model, FootSim, was published in iScience! Well done team!