Team
Stefan Van der Stigchel - Principal Investigator
- Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the department of Experimental Psychology at Utrecht University
- Director of the Helmholtz Insitute
- President of the Dutch Society for Brain & Cognition
- Recipient of VENI, VIDI and VICI NWO grant, and ERC Consolidator grant
- Author of popular science books in Dutch about visual attention: 'Zo werkt aandacht', 'Concentration' and 'Beter Leren Kijken'
Surya Gayet
How is the continuous influx of visual information on our retinae transformed into a comprehensible visual world that is useful to behavior, and that ultimately leads to a conscious visual experience? To address this question I combine neuroimaging, computational, physiological, and behavioral methods. Keywords describing my research interests include "visual perception", "visual working memory", "consciousness", and "attentional selection".
Samson Chota
Visual working memory processes have almost exclusively been studied under conditions where the to-be remembered stimuli were absent. In most cases however, visual stimuli stay accessibly to perception. On top of that, recent electro-physiological findings suggest that WM processes are also engaged for stimuli that are still in view. My goal is to use EEG and MVPA to investigate what information is maintained in WM when stimuli are perceptually accessible and test which factors can influence these representations.
Andre Sahakian
Hi there! I am Andre. My interest goes out to human consciousness. Especially how our brain tricks us into experiencing a rich and vivid visual world, while the input from the eyes is mostly blurry and we are pretty much blind to anything we do not attend. Questions like “How do we represent the visual world around us?” or “What visual information do we store from one moment to the next?” keep me up at night (figuratively). During my PhD I will conduct behavioral experiments in virtual environments to better understand how visual working memory is used in our daily lives.
Jeffrey Harris
Hi, I am a researcher passionate about learning how humans experience the virtual world, why it sometimes feels as real as the physical world and how we can use that feeling for practical purposes. In my PhD I focus on the concept of presence, which is defined as "the feeling of being in a virtual environment". My work revolves around finding ways in which we can objectively measure presence as well as understanding which factors influence the experience of presence. I work with virtual and augmented reality and eye tracking while using various statistical analysis approaches.
Rutger Stuut
Little is known about bridge/lock operators’ eye movements during actual operation. As an external PhD candidate I aim to better understand eye gaze behaviour by analysing operators’ eye tracking recordings. From a practical perspective, careful studies of eye gaze can for instance inform what kind of visual information is required during their task execution. This could in turn inform about the (re)design of their professional workspace or work process. From a theoretical perspective, the research can give insights into eye gaze behaviour in professional settings.
Yuqing Cai
Hi everyone! I am Yuqing Cai. My primary research interest focuses on developing and validating models to predict pupil size changes in response to dynamic visual stimuli (e.g., movies). Pupillometry is a powerful tool for investigating cognition and vision. However, because pupil size is also strongly influenced by low-level visual features (e.g., luminance and contrast), its application is restricted, especially in complex environments. During my PhD, I aim to address this limitation by advancing the pupil modeling approach and exploring its applications in various domains: in clinical contexts to detect visual field defects and spatial neglect, in cognitive researches to index visual attention, and in everyday settings to measure cognitive effort in driving.
Beleke de Zwart
Attention allows us to filter information from the world around us. Depending on what we are doing, we can focus on a large visual area, which is necessary when walking in the busy city centre of Utrecht, or a small visual area, like when you are looking for your keys on your desk. We refer to this attentional mechanism as the spotlight of attention. We already know that you can adjust the size of this spotlight depending on what you are doing. But, we don't know yet whether there are stable differences in this attentional spotlight between people; is your standard spotlight size smaller or bigger than that of someone else? During my PhD, I study the effects of ageing, attention-related disorders, sensory hypersensitivity and potential cultural variations on the attentional spotlight to investigate whether there are differences in the functioning and characteristics.
Lab alumni
Former PhD students
Sanne Böing
Yun Ding
Jasper Fabius
Alex Hoogerbrugge
Damian Koevoet
Rudmer Menger
Martijn Schut
Luzi Xu
Paul Zerr
Other
Joris Elshout
Erik Oudman
Nathan van der Stoep