Welcome to the Visual Cognitive Neuroscience Lab!

The research in our lab aims at understanding how the human mind constructs a visual world and how the brain represents this construction. What is the nature of scene representations in the mind and the brain? How do these scene representations guide our action and navigation in the world? We ask these questions with a special focus on high-level visual scene representations.

The overarching theme of our research is that visual scene understanding is a constructive process that integrates multiple levels of visual, spatial, temporal, and functional properties. Based on this idea, we aim to develop a framework that explains how a network of brain regions play discrete and complementary roles in multiple levels of scene processing. We use behavioral and functional neuroimaging (fMRI) methods that allow us to get insight into representational spaces in the mind and the brain. 

The guiding philosophy to our approach is that to understand scene representation one must look beyond just the physical visual input and consider scenes as real functional entities that exist in space and time. We are guided by theories from human perception, memory and development to understand how we achieve a sophisticated understanding of the visual world that shapes how we interact and navigate.