About the study

Martina’s research explores how the brain develops and updates category knowledge across the senses. In everyday life, we recognise objects both by sight and by touch, but how well does knowledge learned in one sense transfer to another? And how flexibly can these representations adapt when category rules change?

Martina investigates the behavioural and neural correlates of how people learn to categorise objects along specific perceptual dimensions in either vision or haptics, and how efficiently they update this knowledge when category boundaries shift. This work examines how multisensory category representations are formed, generalised across modalities, and reorganised in response to changing demands.

Martina is extending this research to examine how these processes change across the lifespan. In particular, I investigate how age-related decline in haptic perception influences cross-modal category learning and cognitive flexibility. By comparing younger and older adults, Martina aims to determine whether reduced tactile sensitivity affects the formation, transfer, or updating of multisensory representations.

Together, this research provides insight into the neural and behavioural mechanisms that support adaptive cognition in both healthy ageing and sensory decline.

What we measure