Martijn Meeter
Dr. Martijn Meeter, Assistant Professor
What fascinates you in the area of cognitive neuropsychology?
I study cognitive domains like attention and memory and brain structures like the superior collicus and the hippocampus. That this has become virtually the same thing is what I find most fascinating: psychology and neuroscience are slowly becoming one field, where the one guides the other and vice versa. And cognitive neuropsychology is right in the middle of the action.
For example, neuropsychologists have known that the hippocampus is involved in memory since the famous HM in the fifties (since no one knew what that flab of brain was doing, a surgeon didn't think much of cutting it out, causing HM to lose his memory). After HM, biologists started investigating the hippocampus in animals, but they came to very different conclusions: it was not about memory but about space, or hunger, or one of the other 30 things they proposed. Psychologists thought the tests of the biologists were just bad, and better tests proved them right: also the animal hippocampus stores memories. Mostly spatial memories, though, and that finding was later confirmed with human imaging studies.
What are recent accomplishments in your research?
I've never discovered anything, I've only shown that some theories about the brain make sense and others not so much. And I've proposed some theories of my own, for example about why, if you are searching for objects, you get faster if you constantly search for the same object instead of for constantly different objects. Whether those theories can count as accomplishments will only be clear in ten years.
What are you working on at the moment?
I am currently working on several models of the brain. One investigates learning in fearful rats. Rats can learn rapidly what things and places they have to fear (for example because they will get a shock if a light blinks or if they go to one corner of their cage). We know that the amygdala, a set of little structures in the center of the brain, plays a role in such learning, but what does it do exactly? To find that out, I'm trying to explain effects of different kinds of brain lesions on fear and learning in one computer model of the brain. Of course, the hope is that what is true of the brain of the rat will also turn out to be true of the brain of fearful humans.
