Probing temperature perception in humans: psychophysics, computational modelling, and neuroimaging
(2024) LFIN scientific meeting 2024 — Location: Copenhagen (Denmark) (25.November.2024)
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- Abstract
- The primary focus of my research is to understand the mechanisms underlying temperature and pain perception in humans. To do so, I use a combination of behavioural tasks (psychophysical thresholding and scaling paradigms, reversal learning tasks…), imaging techniques (EEG, fMRI), and computational modelling. I have used these approaches to study the brain response to brief innocuous cold and noxious heat stimuli (EEG ERPs) and determine how they are affected by stimulation parameters (area, temperature rate of change), by the topical application of chemical agonists of different molecular receptors for heat and cold, or by the age of the participants. I have also probed the brain responses (EEG) to periodic innocuous cold, noxious heat and vibrotactile stimuli using both time domain, time-frequency and frequency tagging analyses. I have also developed the use of adaptive psychophysical methods to estimate psychometric functions describing the probability of detecting cold and warm stimuli and used such methods to determine how these are affected by the area of the stimulus (spatial summation) and by diabetes mellitus. More recently, I have developed a task and a series of computational models to probe how we form and update expectations about stimulus painfulness and how these expectations are integrated with sensory information to form the final percept (placebo/nocebo effect). We used this task to assess the test-retest reliability of pain learning parameters (and therefore gauge whether they could be trait-like) and to probe where in the brain these processes take place (using fMRI). Recently, I have also started developing a new psychophysical scaling task that will allow us to estimate the latent sensory magnitude and precision of different stimuli without having to rely on ratings. So far, the majority of my work has been conducted in healthy young volunteers but, in the future, I would like to further develop research lines with older healthy adults and patients. Similarly, whereas my research has primarily focused on more “exteroceptive” thermosensation and nociception, I would be interested to also extand my research to also include more “interoceptive” aspects such as thermoregulation.
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Courtin, A., & et al. (2024). Probing temperature perception in humans: psychophysics, computational modelling, and neuroimaging. LFIN scientific meeting 2024, Copenhagen (Denmark). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/239648