Former Max Planck Fellow Research Group Attention and Awareness
The "Attention and Awareness" group investigates the neural basis of conscious experience in humans. Specifically we are interested in:
- Is it possible to predict what a person is thinking based alone on their current brain activity?
- Where are different types of conscious experiences encoded in the brain?
- Are changes in attention and awareness reflected in dynamic changes in connectivity between remote brain areas?
Our main research method is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in combination with behavioral paradigms that are specially adapted for use in the scanner. For the fMRI analysis we use a combination of methods, such as cortical flattening and retinotopic mapping, connectivity analysis (PPI, DCM, Granger causality) and multivariate decoding (pattern recognition. e.g. using Fisher discriminant analysis and support vector machines).