Dr. Simon Lacey manages the lab of Dr. Krishnankutty Sathian, which employs both psychophysical and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in an ongoing research program with the ultimate goal of a better understanding of the meta-modal brain organized around task-based regions that receive multisensory inputs. This is in contrast to the old orthodoxy of the brain as organized around discrete unisensory regions whose task-related outputs are generated elsewhere.

The lab is interested in interactions between different sensory modalities in perception and mental imagery; how aspects of cognition, for example, language processing or music perception, may be grounded in sensory processes; and how perception and imagery may be modulated by sensory loss or impairment (e.g., in the congenitally, early- and/or late-blind) and in special populations (e.g., in synesthesia or in musicians).

Current interests in the lab include understanding the underlying mechanisms and neural basis of synesthesia and crossmodal correspondences; individual differences in mental imagery and object recognition in different modalities; the contribution of sound-symbolic crossmodal correspondences to language; metaphor processing; neuroesthetics; and multisensory processing in neurodegenerative disease.