Christopher L. Asplund

Brief introduction

I am a cognitive (neuro)scientist, meaning that I explore our amazing cognitive abilities and how they are realized in the brain. Specifically, I seek to understand attentional control and consciousness.

I am currently an Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore.

You can learn more about my academic work from my website (including the sections below), CV, list of publications, ORCiD profie, or page on Google Scholar.

Visual surprise responses in a surprise-induced blindness paradigm.
Image credit: Gwenisha Liaw

Interests and approaches

My lab and I are interested in "normal" human function and experience as well as their variety and potential. Our questions include:

What are different attentional states and how can we study them?
Why do individuals differ in their ability to flexibly deploy attention, including in clinically-relevant conditions such as ASD or ADHD?
What is the role of surprise in learning and psychological states such as pain?
To what degree can cognitive training or other non-invasive methods change attentional function?
What are the effects of attentional states, individual differences, and interventions on both experience and performance?

Our primary investigative tool is behavioral experimentation. It is often complemented by functional neuroimaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), eye-tracking, and other physiological measures.

Very broadly, I am interested in how consciousness and intelligence emerge from matter, especially networks of neurons, and what they can do in the world. After all, "We're star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." (That's Carl Sagan from Episode 1 of "Cosmos: A personal voyage", which first aired in 1980.)

Academic appointments

Primary

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at the National University of Singapore (NUS). My lab is housed in the N.1 Institute for Health, where I am a Primary Investigator. We are physically located on the 5th floor of the Centre for Life Sciences (CeLS) at the following address: 28 Medical Drive, #05-COR, Singapore 117456.

I am also a faculty member at Yale-NUS College, where I serve as Head of Studies for the Psychology major. As a liberal arts college, Yale-NUS focuses on excellent undergraduate education from the humanities to the sciences, active learning in small seminar-style classes, participation in community initiatives, and deep investigation through research.

Courtesy

I hold courtesy joint appointments with the Department of Psychology (NUS), the Institute for Digital Medicine (WiSDM; Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine), the Centre for Sleep and Cognition (Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine), and the program in Neuroscience and Behavioural Disorders (Duke-NUS Medical School). Many of my collaborators are members of this department, institute, centre, or program.

Beyond the University

I am currently the treasurer for the Society for Neuroscience, Singapore chapter (SfN sg). I was also recently chair of the organizing committee for the Asia Pacific Conference on Vision 2024 in Singapore (APCV 2024 SG). APCV is held in a different country each year.

This word cloud contains the most commonly used words in my tenure dossier, with greater size representing greater frequency. The graphic was created using Wordle. Other examples can be found on the Word Clouds page.