Chris Olivers
Dr. Chris Olivers, Assistant Professor
What fascinates you in the area of cognitive neuropsychology?
What fascinates me about our science is that it lies at the crossroads of several different disciplines: From the psychological perspective we measure behaviour in normal-functioning or neurally damaged people. From the brain science perspective we tray to find out which brain areas are involved in these behaviours and how they operate. From a computational science perspective we try to build formal models that mimic and explain the behaviours and brain activations we observe. And from a philosophical perspective we ponder on how the combination of all this leads to such beautiful phenomena like perception, memory, language, and consciousness. My research focuses on perception: How come we see the world the way we do? My work deals mainly with healthy individuals, but it remains fascinating how certain brain damage distorts the perceptual reality for some patients.
What are recent accomplishments in your research?
My research concerns visual attention. Attention refers to the mechanisms the brain uses to select relevant information from the perceptual input, and comes close to what we call consciousness. I have looked at how stimuli that appear at different moments in time receive different priorities in the visual system, depending on their other properties such as color and shape. I have also looked at the effects of (conscious) or implicit (unconscious) memory on attention. In the past I have worked with patients with several forms of brain damage to try and find out more about the brain mechanisms involved.
What are you working on at the moment?
It turns out that people are often unaware of important information in rapidly changing streams. Martijn Meeter and I have come up with a theory for why that is. We developed a model of the temporal dynamics of attention in tasks. Recently Erik van der Burg and I have also started to work on the effects of other senses on visual attention, such as the effect of auditory signals.
