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| Tessa Marlijn Dekker | |||||||||||||||||
I am a MPhil/PhD student in the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development researching the development of object representations in the brain. My supervisors are Professors Denis Mareschal, Martin I. Sereno and Mark H. Johnson. I am funded by a Marie Curie Host Fellowship for early stage research training. Humans are possessed of only a very clumsy pile of skin, bone and muscle and a tangled mess of intricately connected neural cells and yet we very quickly learn to make sense of the world, move around in it and even play Schubert violin sonata's while riding a unicycle. (Okay, so I don't actually know anyone who does do this, but I don't doubt that someone out there could, and they will probably be coming soon to a YouTube near you.) In all cases, this takes learning and that learning starts early but many of our skills can take a long time to master. In adults, areas in the brain that specialize in processing different aspects of objects in the world (i.e., color, motion, shape, associated actions and object location in various coordinate-frames) show a consistent organization. I aim to investigate how these brain regions develop while children learn to deal with objects in the world around them. Moreover, I am exploring how the dynamics between these regions change in response to experience and across different task-contexts. For this I use a combination of fMRI, eye-tracking and behavioural research.
PublicationsWill appear here shortly. Links
The Birkbeck-UCL Centre for Neuroimaging:
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