Welcome!

I am an associate professor on Computational Cognitive Neuroscience in the Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen.

My main research interest is the development and improvement of analysis methods that connect computational (cognitive) models to neuroimaging data. Better methods will enable a more fine-grained analysis of the astounding amount of neuroimaging data that is collected worldwide. Ultimately, this should lead to a better understanding of the human mind, which should take the form of computational cognitive models at different levels of abstraction, from higher level process models in the cognitive architecture ACT-R to low-level spiking-neuron models developed in Nengo.

As a first step, we have used a symbolic process model for model-based fMRI analysis, showing that it outperforms traditional and parametric fMRI analysis methods. Subsequently, we applied this method to five previously published datasets, and used these analyses to locate working memory updates and declarative retrievals within the fronto-parietal network. More recently, together with John Anderson, I have used Hidden Markov Models in combination with multi-variate pattern analysis to automatically discover cognitive processing stages in EEG data.

Until 2011, I was a PhD student in the department of Artificial Intelligence of the University of Groningen. Together with my advisors, Niels Taatgen and Hedderik van Rijn, I investigated a cognitive bottleneck in human multitasking: processing intermediate representations. In addition, we developed a technique to map components of symbolic process models directly on the brain using model-based fMRI analysis.

Research Group

I currently advise one postdoc, Gabriel Weindel, and four PhD candidates: Moritz Held, Joshua Krause, Thomas Tiotto, and Yuanyuan Weng.

Former PhD students