Overview
Our research explores how information from vision, hearing and touch is combined to create coherent perceptual and emotional experiences. We investigate how temporal synchrony, sensory reliability, previous experience and expertise influence the way people interpret movement, sound and social interaction.
This work spans controlled studies of audiovisual integration and timing, naturalistic research involving dance and music, and the design of tactile experiences using vibration and temperature. Together, these approaches help us understand how multisensory information shapes perception, emotion and embodied engagement.
Research themes
Our research examines how sensory signals are combined across five connected areas, from audiovisual emotion and temporal synchrony to expertise, spectatorship and affective touch.
Methods and Capabalities
We combine controlled psychophysical experiments, naturalistic performance studies, motion capture, brain imaging and multisensory prototype development. These methods allow us to study sensory integration from both fundamental and applied perspectives.
Selected publications
Purring Wheel: Thermal and Vibrotactile Notifications on the Steering Wheel
Patrizia Di Campli San Vito, Stephen Brewster, Frank Pollick, Simon Thompson, Lee Skrypchuk and Alexandros Mouzakitis
ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, 2020.
This work investigated how thermal and vibrotactile signals presented through a steering wheel could communicate notifications without relying exclusively on visual attention. Read the publication
Spectators’ Aesthetic Experience of Sound and Movement in Dance Performance: A Transdisciplinary Investigation
Matthew Reason, Corinne Jola, Rosie Kay, Dee Reynolds, Jukka-Pekka Kauppi, Marie-Hélène Grosbras, Jussi Tohka and Frank Pollick
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 10(1), 42–55, 2016.
This study combined qualitative audience research and functional brain imaging to examine how sound and movement contribute to the experience of watching dance. Read the publication
Audiovisual Integration of Emotional Signals from Others’ Social Interactions
Lukasz Piwek, Frank Pollick and Karin Petrini
Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 611, 2015.
This research examined how people combine body movement and voice when judging emotions during social interactions, including situations where the auditory and visual signals conflict. Read the publication
Uni- and Multisensory Brain Areas Are Synchronised Across Spectators When Watching Unedited Dance Recordings
Corinne Jola, Philip McAleer, Marie-Hélène Grosbras, Scott A. Love, Gordon Morison and Frank E. Pollick
i-Perception, 4(4), 265–284, 2013.
This fMRI study investigated shared neural responses while spectators watched naturalistic dance with and without accompanying sound. Read the publication
Expertise with Multisensory Events Eliminates the Effect of Biological Motion Rotation on Audiovisual Synchrony Perception
Karin Petrini, Samuel Paul Holt and Frank Pollick
Journal of Vision, 10(5), 2010.
This study showed how musical expertise alters audiovisual synchrony perception, demonstrating that experience can reshape how movement and sound are integrated. Read the publication