Jan Theeuwes
Dr. Jan Theeuwes, Full Professor
What fascinates you in the area of cognitive neuropsychology?
To me the fascinating aspect of Cognitive Neuropsychology is to link behaviour of the normal-functioning as well as the brain-damaged people to the functioning of the brain. Currently there are new and existing techniques that allow us to examine brain activity while people perform a task. Theories of normal cognition are applied to the study of cognitive disorders arising from brain damage. When possible findings from patients (i.e., unilateral visual neglect and extinction) are related to data from functional neuroimaging of normal humans, and to data from single-cell and lesions studies in primates. I mainly work in the area of attention (visual and auditory) and eye movement control
What are recent accomplishments in your research?
During the past 10 years I developed a task referred to as the oculomotor capture task in which we can determine the extent to which people are able to suppress automatic reflexive eye movements to salient events. This task provides an important indication of top-down control.This task was tested on patients with Parkinson, on ADHD children and the elderly. The results show that especially ADHD kids and Parkinson patients have trouble with inhibiting reflexive eye movements. Interestingly, elderly people are able to control the reflexive eye movements.
What are you working on at the moment?
Currently, with my student Manon Mulckhuyse and post-doc Durk Talsma we participate in a large international project called Human Frontiers Sciences investigating the basic mechanism underlying eye movement control. We collaborate with researchers from the United States, Canada and Japan. In this project we use brain imaging in humans (fMRI and ERP), single cell recordings in awake monkeys and neural network modeling to determine exactly how the brain controls our eyes.
