BLIP Lab is pleased to announce its involvement in collaborative research with the GUSTO Project, Singapore’s most comprehensive longitudinal birth cohort.  Six years ago, the project called ‘Growing Up in Singapore Towards healthy Outcomes (GUSTO) was launched to investigate links between maternal health during pregnancy, and babies’ outcomes. Now the children are all heading towards their sixth birthday, and the investigations continue. BLIP Lab’s work with the GUSTO team is investigating some of the relationships between different languages that children hear at home.

As part of our collaboration, we have also launched an investigation into how children in the GUSTO group link up the sounds of words to their possible meanings, using a fun game called Alien Zoo. In this game, children are visiting the Alien Zoo, when all of the friendly creatures have escaped, and become mixed up. Their job is to help the zookeepers sort  out which aliens are which, by guessing which ones make which noise, or have which name. This study will help us to understand how connections between the senses develop in children, and how these connections might relate to other skills that children will need in school.

If you would like to know more – or perhaps even try out the game yourself, you can find out more about it here, or via our GAMES page

Researchers at Royal Holloway recently made the news by sharing a video of fMRI captured while someone sang along to an Adele song in the scanner.

The video is fantastic (follow the link above to watch). It shows how the mouth moves in order to produce different kinds of sounds. If you’re anything like we are, you’ll find yourself watching it endlessly.

We made a gif to help you know what to look out for while you are watching!

In July, BLIP Lab attended a conference all about Vision – The Asia Pacific Conference on Vision. BLIP Lab PhD student Shang Nan presented a poster outlining her latest work on links between hearing and vision for people with different experience speaking the Chinese language (abstract). Asst Prof Suzy Styles gave a presentation about how people connect different kinds of visual shapes to the ‘voices’ of different instruments, and an invited talk about how different streams of evidence suggest that language development not only shapes auditory perception of the language itself, but also influences linkages between sight and sound. You can read the abstracts using the links below:

Shang N & Styles SJ (2015) ‘Language background changes audio-visual mapping of shapes-to-sounds,’ Poster presented at the Asia Pacific Conference on Vision, July 2015, Singapore.

Styles SJ (2015) ‘Giving shape to the voices of instruments: Audio-visual correspondences between spatial and temporal frequencies,’ Asia Pacific Conference on Vision, July 2015, Singapore.

Styles SJ (2015), ‘Perceptual tuning and its multisensory outcomes: Language adaptation influences crossmodal processing,’ Asia Pacific Conference on Vision, July 2015, Singapore.

BLIP Lab is preparing to build brand new Sensory Neuroscience laboratories. Construction began this week, and is expected to be completed in August this year.

The new space will include sound-proof rooms for investigations of sensory interactions, and will be specially designed for juniour participants, including babies!