Brain & Cognition

Prof. Kia Nobre

OUR QUESTIONS

We live under the illusion that we can sense everything around us, but scientific evidence suggests that our sampling of the world is highly selective and proactively shaped by numerous internal and external factors. At the Brain and Cognition Lab we are interested in how the human brain gives rise to our mental experience. We investigate how the brain proactively and dynamically shapes our 'selective attention', which comprises our goals, expectation and experiences. All of these are fundamental to the development of healthy cognition, and their disruption contributes significantly to symptoms experienced in neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative conditions. To summarise, the lines of scientific enquiry covered by the lab would fall under keywords such as attention and perception, working and long-term memory, timing and aging, as well as analysis methods.

OUR METHODS

We combine careful measures of behavioural performance with a variety of state-of-the-art methods to measure and stimulate brain activity in human volunteers. Every method has its unique strengths and limitations, and a multi-pronged approach allows us to delve deeper into our challenging research areas. To achieve this, we utilise advanced neuroscientifc methods such as EEG, MEG, structural and functional MRI, and TMS, that are enabled by our collaboration with the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (WIN). We also use behavioural testing, which might include eyetracking, virtual reality sets and mood monitoring, and focus on the development of new analysis methods, for example in the area of empirical mode decomposition, hidden Markov models and multivariate autoregression.