Speakers > Tomas Knapen
Tomas Knapen did a PhD in physics at Utrecht University, followed by postdocs in cognitive neuroscience in Paris, Nashville, and Amsterdam, where he now maintains a lab at the Spinoza Centre for Neuroimaging at the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. His work covers topics in bistable perception, action-perception integration, and attention. A dominant focus of his lab in Amsterdam is the sensory-topographic organization of the brain into retinotopic, tonotopic, and somatotopic maps. Recent findings highlight how the interplay of activations on these maps gives rise to cognitive processes and perceptual awareness.
Turtles all the way up: sensory-topographic organization throughout the human brain
A fundamental mode of brain organization is that of topographic maps: the homologous representation of a sensor array, such as the retina, on the surface of the cerebral cortex. This topographic organization was traditionally thought to be limited to purely sensory processing. In the first half of my presentation I will recount recent work from my lab demonstrating that sensory-topographic hierarchies extend all the way into the highest levels of the brain’s processing. Specifically, using ultra-high field fMRI we have discovered sensory retinotopic maps in the cerebellum, default mode network, and hippocampus: regions traditionally implicated in coordination of action and memory. These discoveries make sense when we realize that these topographic maps are our sole connections to the world we inhabit, but they leave open the question: What role do these maps and their interactions play in our rich experience of the world? In the second half of my presentation, I will introduce a set of computational modeling and functional connectivity approaches that elucidate how sensory topographies scaffold our rich, real-world cognition. |
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