Daniela Gresch

I am a DPhil student supervised by Kia Nobre, Sage Boettcher, and Freek van Ede, and I am funded by Kia Nobre’s Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award.

Broadly, I am interested in gaining a comprehensive understanding of the interplay between attention, working memory, and timing. More specifically, I focus on how memory-based expectations combine with current task goals to guide adaptive behaviour in dynamic environments. Beyond examining the influence of top-down mechanisms on attention and memory, I further investigate how “bottom-up” biases – those related to stimulus features rather than top down goals – shape these processes. In order to approach these questions, I will combine behavioural methods, eye tracking, and neurophysiological tools such as EEG and MEG.

I hope that my research will inform us further about the workings and quality of human cognition, while simultaneously incorporating real-world complexities. Ultimately, investigating basic mechanisms underlying attention and memory may help explain deficits in adaptive behaviour in psychological, psychiatric, and neurological conditions.

I received my undergraduate degree in Psychology at the Goethe University in Frankfurt where I worked as a research assistant in Melissa Võ’s Scene Grammar Lab. Prior to starting my DPhil, I completed a MSc in Neuro-cognitive Psychology at LMU Munich. During my master studies I was engaged in research at the Visual Attention Lab at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Jeremy Wolfe), the Department of Experimental Psychology at LMU Munich (Heiner Deubel), and the Brain & Cognition Lab at the University of Oxford (Kia Nobre).

I am involved in the Graduate Joint Consultive Committee, which provides a forum for discussion between students and staff at the Department of Experimental Psychology.