Keynotes

Wilma Bainbirdge

Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Chicago 

Wilma Bainbridge is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Principal Investigator at the Brain Bridge Lab. Her research focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of perception and memory, looking at how certain items are intrinsically more memorable than others, and how the brain is sensitive to this information. She finds that there are certain images—photographs and even faces—that are remembered by most people, and some that are globally forgotten. She uses behavioral experiments, computer vision, machine learning, online studies, and functional MRI to understand what makes an item intrinsically memorable, and how the brain processes these items differently. She also explores the visual content of memories, using drawings and functional MRI to decode memory content.

Jorge Morales

Assistant Professor, Psychology & Philosophy, Duke University

Jorge Morales is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Philosophy, and director of the Subjectivity Lab. His research focuses on understanding how we see and imagine the world around us, how the brain creates conscious experiences, and how introspection opens a window into our own minds. With an interdisciplinary approach that integrates tools from psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy, Dr. Morales’s research aims to provide an “objective” understanding of intrinsically “subjective” phenomena involved in visual processing, mental imagery, awareness and metacognition. Inspired by both novel and centuries-old philosophical problems, Dr. Morales uses a wide array of tools such as computer-based psychophysics experiments, eye tracking, pupillometry, 3D-printed and laser-cut objects, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and computational modeling to address research questions.

Adam Zeman

Professor, Cognitive and Behavioural Neurology, Univeristy of Exeter

Adam Zeman trained in Medicine at Oxford University Medical School, after a first degree in Philosophy and Psychology, and later in Neurology in Oxford, at The National Hospital for Neurology in Queen Square, London and Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge. He moved to Edinburgh in 1996, as a Consultant and Senior Lecturer (later Reader) in the Department of Clinical Neurosciences and to the Peninsula Medical School (now University of Exeter Medical School) in September 2005 as Professor of Cognitive and Behavioural Neurology. His specialised clinical work is in cognitive and behavioural neurology, including neurological disorders of sleep. His main research interests are disorders of visual imagery and forms of amnesia occurring in epilepsy. With colleagues in Edinburgh, he coined the term ‘aphantasia’ in 2015 to describe the absence of a mind’s eye.

Lars Muckli

Professor, Visual and Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Glasgow

Lars Muckli is Professor of Visual and Cognitive Neurosciences, and Director of fMRI at the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging (CCNI), in Glasgow and Co-chair of 7T-Imaging Center of Excellence (ICE) MRI. He has worked for 24 years in the field of fMRI and multi-modal brain imaging. His work focuses on brain imaging of cortical feedback, investigation of layer specific fMRI, and multi-level cross –species computational neuroscience. The Muckli-lab was previously funded by ERC consolidator grant on ‘Brain reading of contextual feedback and predictions’. Since 2016, Lars is member of the Human Brain Project (HBP), leading a work package on rodent and human neuroscience on ‘Context-sensitive multisensory object recognition a deep network model constrained by multi-level, multi-species data’.

Andrea Blomkvist

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, Philosphy of Cognitive Science, University of Glasgow

Andrea Blomkvist is based at the University of Glasgow's Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience, where she hold's a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Lord Kelvin/Adam Smith Fellowship. Dr Blomkvist research investigates what unifies mental imagery as a kind which can explain cognitive  phenomea. As part of an interdisciplinary project between neuroscience and philosophy, Dr Blomkvist is also conducting empirical research into the function of mental imagery, and specifically its contribution to episodic memory in individuals with aphantasia.