BIOGRAPHY

Steffan received a BA in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University before carrying out his PhD at Birkbeck College, London, on "Links in spatial attention between touch and vision". He was subsequently a post-doc researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, before joining the Psychology Department here at Essex as a Lecturer in 2007.

RESEARCH OVERVIEW

I am primarily interested in how the senses interact. In particular, we now know that events in one sense can affect how well or poorly we perceive, or attend to, events in other senses. For the case of touch and vision, I am currently investigating how multisensory interactions depend on our body posture. For example, a tactile event on the left hand affects vision differently depending on where in space our hand is placed when it is touched. These issues are intimately related to the brain's representation of the space around us. In a related line of research, I have found that when we can see our skin, our sense of touch on that skin is improved. Current investigations aim to improve our understanding of when and why this multisensory effect occurs. My work to date has used psychophysics, EEG (mostly averaged to ERPs), MEG and TMS to investigate these attentional and perceptual phenomena.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Kennett, S. & Driver, J. (in press). Within hemifield posture changes affect tactile-visual exogenous spatial cueing without spatial precision, especially in the dark. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics. doi: 10.3758/s13414-013-0484-3

Bauer, M., Kennett, S. & Driver, J. (2012). Attentional selection of location and modality in vision and touch modulates low-frequency activity in associated sensory cortices. Journal of Neurophysiology, 107, 2341-2351. doi:10.1152/jn.00973.2011

 

Cooper, N.R., Puzzo, I., Pawley, A., Bowes-Mulligan, R.A., Kirkpatrick, E.V., Antoniou, P.A. & Kennett, S. (2012). Bridging a yawning chasm: EEG investigations into the debate concerning the role of the human mirror neuron system in contagious yawning. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 12, 393-405. doi:10.3758/s13415-011-0081-7

Kennett, S., Rorden, C., Husain, M. & Driver, J. (2010). Cross-modal visual-tactile extinction: Modulation by posture implicates biased competition in proprioceptively reconstructed space. Journal of Neuropsychology, 4, 15-32.

Kennett, S., van Velzen, J., Eimer, M. & Driver, J. (2007). Disentangling gaze shifts from preparatory ERP effects during spatial attention. Psychophysiology, 44, 69-78.

Whiteley, L., Kennett, S., Taylor-Clarke, M. & Haggard, P. (2004). Facilitated processing of visual stimuli associated with the body. Perception, 33, 307-314.

Taylor-Clarke, M., Kennett, S. & Haggard, P. (2004). Persistence of visual-tactile enhancement in humans. Neuroscience Letters, 354, 22-25.

Press, C., Taylor-Clarke, M., Kennett, S. & Haggard, P. (2004). Visual enhancement of touch in spatial body representation. Experimental Brain Research, 154, 238-245.

Haggard, P. Taylor-Clarke, M. & Kennett, S. (2003). Tactile Perception, cortical representation and the bodily self. Current Biology, 13, R170-R173.

Kennett, S., Spence, C. & Driver, J. (2002). Visuo-tactile links in covert exogenous spatial attention remap across changes in unseen hand posture. Perception & Psychophysics. 64, 1083-1094.

Bonfiglioli, C., Duncan, J., Rorden, C. & Kennett, S. (2002). Action and perception: Evidence against converging selection processes. Visual Cognition, 9, 458-476.

Maravita, A., Spence, C., Kennett, S., & Driver, J. (2002). Tool-use changes multimodal spatial interactions between vision and touch in normal humans. Cognition, 83, B25-B34.

Taylor-Clarke, M., Kennett, S. & Haggard, P. (2002). Vision modulates somatosensory cortical processing. Current Biology, 12, 233-236.

Kennett, S., Taylor-Clarke, M. & Haggard, P. (2001). Noninformative vision improves the spatial resolution of touch in humans. Current Biology, 11, 1188-1191.

Kennett, S., Eimer, M., Spence, C. & Driver, J. (2001). Tactile-visual inks in exogenous spatial attention under different postures: Convergent evidence from psychophysics and ERPs. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 13, 462-478.