July 20, 2020
Some exciting behavioral work with Christian Doeller’s group is now available on bioRxiv. The project, led by Doerte Kuhrt and Natalie St. John, shows how immersive VR can be used to facilitate learning of abstract knowledge. This behavioral study is a nice follow-up to my work in the past few years on how abstract knowledge is transformed between different reference frames. The paradigm holds a lot of potential to investigate transfer of learning between spatial cognition and other domains. You can find the link to the preprint below…
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.17.208900v1
April 3, 2020
Some exciting follow-up clinical work to our previous MEG papers exploring medial prefrontal -medial temporal (mPFC-MTL) theta oscillatory phase coupling during spatial memory tasks has been published in Brain. These exciting results show that mPFC-mTL dysconnectivity in schizophrenia is due to a loss of theta phase coupling.
You can read the publication “Impaired theta phase coupling underlies frontotemporal dysconnectivity in schizophrenia” online at… https://academic.oup.com/brain/advance-article/doi/10.1093/brain/awaa035/5814854
January 6, 2020
I’m pleased to announce that the Association for Psychological Science has designated me as a Rising Star in the field. Congratulations to the other ‘Rising Stars’!
You can see the full list at… https://www.psychologicalscience.org/rising-stars/stars.cfm
October 17, 2019
My work with a team from University College London and Universitat Pompeu Fabra,”Human hippocampal theta oscillations reflect sequential dependencies during spatial planning” was recently published in Cognitive Neuroscience. We found that human hippocampal theta power changes relate to successfully planning a sequence of spatial decisions in novel environments.
You can read more at… https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17588928.2019.1676711
May 2, 2019
“Entorhinal transformations in abstract frames of reference” by Karl Friston and I was just published in PLoS Biology. We found that the human entorhinal cortex and subiculum, brain regions that integrate first person and environmental spatial coordinates during navigation, also help us relate social knowledge about other people to ourselves.
This finding is particularly exciting because it highlights a potential novel neural mechanism underlying how we learn about other people and relate to them. Moreover, our findings provide clues about how we can use map-like learning strategies in non-spatial tasks.
You can read more at…
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000230
September 12, 2018
I recently uploaded a new manuscript to bioRxiv titled “Hippocampal-entorhinal transformations in abstract frames of reference”, where we show that the human entorhinal cortex and subiculum help transform metrically coded decision variables from relative to absolute coordinates. Here’s a link to the manuscript…
Human Decision-Making and Memory 