Vincent Hayward

Professor of Tactile Perception & Technologies, Leverhulme Fellow School of Advanced Study, University of London

Abstract

The mechanics of contact is to touch what acoustic waves are to audition and what light waves are to vision. The complex physics of contact, however, differ in fundamental ways from the physics of acoustics and optics. It therefore should be expected that the organisation of the early stages of somatosensory processing be very different from that of equivalent stages in the other sensory modalities. The presentation will describe some salients facts regarding the physics of touch and will continue with the description recent findings regarding the processing of time-evolving tactile inputs in second-order neurones in the cat.

Bio

Vincent Hayward was the holder of the International Chair in Haptics at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, from 2008 to 2011 and was subsequently appointed Professor. From 1989 to 2008, he was Assistant, Associate, and then Full Professor at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, and was director of the McGill Research Center for Intelligent Machines from 2001 to 2004. Vincent Hayward is a Fellow of the IEEE and just completed of an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. Since January 2017, Hayward is a Leverhulme Visiting Professor of Tactile Perception and Technologies at the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London.