Our Research

The Sensomotion Lab is a research group at the Paris-Saclay Institute of Neurosciences (NeuroPSI) in Saclay, France.

How do our movements shape the way we perceive the world?

The survival of any organism is closely tied to its ability to explore and make sense of its surrounding environment. A substantial amount of the sensory stimuli we experience is generated not by external changes in the world around us, but by our own movements. For instance, the retina can receive identical stimuli whether we move our head or whether an object in our surroundings moves. As such, the brain must be able to account for our movements in order to accurately interpret these sensory inputs. In other words, what we perceive is not merely a direct reflection of what we see. Our brain processes and decodes sensory information by factoring in our own movements and spatial position. The focus of our research is to unravel the neural circuits and computational algorithms responsible for integrating sensory and motor signals within the sensory systems themselves.

In pursuit of this goal, we employ a multidisciplinary methodology that combines a range of advanced techniques, including neuronal tracing, optogenetic manipulations, 2-Photon imaging (both calcium and voltage), and extracellular recordings in awake mice. Additionally, we track eye and head movements and carry out in-depth theoretical analyses of the collected data.