Research

I am Simon Hanslmayr, a Professor here in the School of Psychology & Neuroscience. My research focuses on how thoughts, feelings, or a face we attend to are produced by orchestrated neural firing patterns in distributed brain networks. Precise timing of this neural activity is required in order to represent information in brain networks, and to form lasting memories. Neural oscillations establish such precise timing, which is why I chose to investigate oscillations to understand how the brain implements cognition. To this end my research primarily focuses on attention and memory processes in healthy populations, but I am also interested in how these processes are affected in clinical populations, like patients suffering from Schizophrenia or Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder (PTSD). In order to study neural oscillations in humans my lab uses a broad array of electrophysiological and imaging methods from the global scale, such as EEG/MEG, fMRI, combined EEG-fMRI, to the local scale such as intracranial EEG and single unit recordings in humans. Going beyond correlating oscillations with cognition, we also study the causal role of oscillations by externally perturbing the brain via rhythmic sensory stimulation (i.e. flickering or amplitude modulated sounds), rhythmic transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and transcranial electrical stimulation (TES) and investigate the impact of such oscillatory perturbations on cognition. Finally, we integrate the findings of both data streams (i.e. correlative and causal) via computational models. These models make specific predictions which we test in correlational and causal experiments. My aim with this multidisciplinary, multimodal and multiscale approach is to draw a detailed picture of how the human brain perceives, stores and retrieves information.