Catching cold : exploration of the human perception of innocuous cold using chemical sensitization, EEG and psychophysics

Courtin, Arthur [UCL]

Temperature sensing is involved in many different functions, ranging from fundamental homeostatic regulation to complex inferential processes on outside world properties. Due to the technical difficulty of generating well controlled cooling stimuli, significantly less research has been conducted on cold than on heat perception. The availability of new stimulators, enabling the generation of fast and strong cold stimuli, opens new experimental possibilities. This PhD dissertation aimed to develop new techniques to probe human innocuous cold perception, use these new techniques to probe the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying human cold perception, and assess whether these new techniques could be of interest in a clinical setting. These efforts were directed more specifically in two directions: improving the psychophysical assessment of cold detection and developing stimuli and analysis techniques allowing the exploration of cold evoked activity with electroencephalography.