L.E.A.S.

Looking for Emotions in the Absence of Sight
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions - HORIZON 2020

Giada Lettieri, PhD
MSCA fellow

Université Catholique de Louvain
Louvain-la-Neuve 1348 Belgium

Supervisor: Prof. Olivier Collignon
CPP Laboratory

How emotions are perceived in the absence of vision

Facial expressions reveal people's emotional states. From happiness and surprise to fear and disgust, interpretation relies on detecting salient information. This is a task chiefly accomplished through vision. Affective signals are conveyed through nonverbal communication and can be experienced and perceived exclusively through sight. In this context, the EU-funded LEAS project investigates how emotions are perceived in the absence of vision. To find the answers, LEAS studies how much the representation of emotional bodily sensations depends on sight and whether the stream of affect is differently encoded in the brain of sighted and blind individuals.

Semantic representation
of feelings

Using semi-structured interviews and computational linguistics, we explore whether early, late blind and sighted share the same semantic representation of positive and negative feelings

Bodily maps
of emotions

Using a naturalistic haptic task, we investigate whether visually impaired and sighted subjects retain different somatotopic maps of bodily sensations of emotions

Coding of affective experience in the brain

Using neuroimaging and naturalistic stimulation, we assess whether different brain networks are involved in the coding of affective experiences across visually impaired and sighted individuals

Get in touch

Write to giada.lettieri@uclouvain.be for any question on LEAS