Field of Research:
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
In Germany:
01.03.2006 -
30.09.2006
Host's project description
Laudatio (English)
Starting with the publication of his dissertation on "Audio-visual links in attention" (supervised by Prof. Dr. Jon Driver, now at Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, London), Dr. Charles Spence set the starting point of a re-discovery of research on multisensory processes. This research asks how inputs of different sensory systems (vision, hearing, touch, olfaction, gustation) are integrated to result in a unified percept. Charles Spence has developed a number of experimental paradigms to investigate the major principles of integration between these different sensory modalities ("crossmodal integration"). While he initially mainly used experimental-behavioural techniques to study the role of supramodal features (these are features that all modalities are able to code, e.g., space, motion, time, meaning and numerosity), he has more recently cooperated in projects with research groups in Italy, Spain, Canada, the U.S. and Japan to directly assess brain activity during multisensory processes by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), event-related potentials (ERP), and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
The following facts, among others, underline the pioneering and leading role of Charles Spence in multisensory research:
(a) In 1999, Charles Spence organized the first conference on multisensory research in Oxford (the "International Multisensory Research Forum", IMRF) which has since then been taking place annually at varying locations across Europe and the U.S.
(b) Charles Spence has edited two books on multisensory research:
(1) Calvert, Spence & Stein (2004) Handbook on Multisensory processes, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.
(2) Spence & Driver (2004) Crossmodal space and crossmodal attention, Oxford University Press: Oxford.
These books are currently the leading "dictionaries" and teaching resources for multisensory processes in the cognitive neurosciences.
(c) The amount of Charles Spence's publications in general is tremendous and particularly impressive given his young age of 36 years. Besides the two edited books he has published more than 100 original journal articles in internationally well known, partly high ranking journals, including Science. Moreover, Charles Spence has contributed 24 chapters to compiled volumes.
(d) Charles Spence is among the first who have started to transfer knowledge from basic science on multisensory perception to real life applications like car panel design and multimodal food design.
A striking feature of Charles Spence's publications is that he cites and acknowledges research which is often more than 100 years old and is often not available in English. For example, in his paper on "Multimodal prior entry" (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2001) Charles Spence cited Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, the name-giver of this award because prior entry research investigates the problems originally faced by astronomers.
Charles Spence is currently extending his work on the principles of multisensory interactions (see: http://www.psych.ox.ac.uk/xmodal/ ). For example, during his visit to the University of Hamburg (section: Biological Psychology and Neuropsychology: http://bpn.uni-hamburg.de), made possible through the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel award, he will investigate the role of vision for setting up the processes leading to multisensory integration during childhood development.
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