People

Luke E. Miller 

Principal Investigator

Luke joined the Donders Centre for Cognition as an Assistant Professor of Sensorimotor Neuroscience in the fall of 2021. He previously had postdoctoral fellowships at the Donders Institute (w/ Pieter Medendorp) and at the ImpAct Team in Lyon, France (w/ Alessandro Farnè). It was during this time that he began researching the neural and computational mechanisms underlying the sensory embodiment of tools—the ability to use them as somatosensory extensions of the body. His current research aims to uncover the computational principles underlying neural body representation and their plasticity. He currently teaches an MSc course in the Artificial Intelligence department on sensorimotor neurotechnology, which among other things covers the principles of neural prosthetics and brain machine interfaces.

Valeria Peviani

Postdoctoral Fellow (w/ Pieter Medendorp)

Valeria Peviani is a postdoctoral fellow at the Donders Institute for Brain Cognition and Behavior, supported by the Radboud Excellence Initiative. She is interested in the neurocomputational mechanisms underlying the perception of body and body part position and shape. Before joining the Donders Institute, she got her PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Pavia, Italy. There she researched healthy and pathological cognitive functioning, in particular in the context of body perception and representation (supervisor: Prof. G. Bottini). After her PhD, she continued her research in the lab of David Poeppel, under the direct supervision of Lucia Melloni (Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main, Germany).

Dominika Radziun

Postdoctoral Researcher

Dominika Radziun is a postdoctoral researcher at the Donders Institute for Brain Cognition and Behavior. Her research focuses on understanding the plasticity of spatial body representations from a computational perspective. For example, how do hand-extending exoskeletons change the computations that turn somatosensory input into a representation of the hand? She got her PhD in Neuroscience at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, where she researched body perception and brain plasticity in blind and sighted individuals under the supervision of Prof. Henrik Ehrsson (Karolinska Insitutet) and Prof. Marcin Szwed (Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland).

Huseyin Orkun-Elmas

PhD Student

Hüseyin is a PhD student in the BBT Lab at Donders Institute for Brain Cognition and Behavior. He completed his MSc in neuroscience at Bilkent University, under the supervision of Dr. Burcu Aysen Urgen. During his MSC he investigated how prior information influences biological motion perception, utilizing EEG and behavioral experiments. Now at Donders Institute, Hüseyin's research focus has pivoted to tactile localization. He's deeply interested in modeling the computational mechanisms that underlie tactile localization in both 2D and 3D spaces. His overarching goal is to decipher the neural implementations of these computations.

Floris van Wettum

Master's Student – Artificial Intelligence

Floris is currently completing his MSc in the Artificial Intelligence Department at Radboud University. For his thesis project, Floris will explore how sensory substitution can be leveraged to create an additional sense of body space. He will then use computational modelling to explore whether this new sensory signal is optimally integrated with existing signals (proprioception and vision).

Rob Pennekamp

Master's Student – Artificial Intelligence

Rob is currently completing his MSc in the Artificial Intelligence Department at Radboud University. For his thesis project, Rob will explore how different aspects of feedback control (e.g., forward estimation, feedback gain) are implemented by neural population dynamics. To do so he will combine neural network modelling and analyses of pre-existing neural recordings.

Manon Joosten

Master's Student – Cognitive Neuroscience; (w/ Pieter Medendorp)

Manon completed her BS in Mathematics at Radboud University. She is now completing her MSc in the Cognitive Neuroscience program at the Donders Institute.  For her thesis project, she is building a Bayesian model of a postural arm representation in three-dimensions. This specifically involves characterizing the polar-to-cartesian reference frame transformation, and the extent that it is influenced by priors in postural space.

Cécile Fabio

PhD Student  (w/ Alessandro Farnè)

Cécile did both her MSc thesis and PhD at the CRNL ImpAct Team in Lyon, France, where she was co-supervised by me and Ale Farnè. She employed EEG to investigate whether tool-users repurpose neural processes for mapping touch on the body to map touch on a tool. In several experiments, Cécile directly compared neural responses for touch on the body (hands or arms) and hand-held tools. Her work consistently found a remarkable similarity between patterns of neural responses (alpha oscillations and evoked potentials) for spatial processing on both hands and tools. Cécile is now a postdoctoral researcher with Christoph Kayser at Bielefeld University.

Felix Jarto

Master's Student – Cognitive Neuroscience (w/ Pieter Medendorp)

Felix was in the Cognitive Neurosience Master's program here at the DCC and completed his thesis in the lab. In his thesis, Felix was interested in the sensory information used by tool-users to localize where a tool is touched. Do so, he use a whole-hand array of accelerometers to record the hand's vibratory response during tool use. He then used a skin-neuron model to model how this responses is encoded in the spiking patterns of Pacinian afferents. This provides an estimate of the input the brain receives during tool use. He used machine learning techniques to show how location information is encoded by these signals. Felix is now a PhD student with Sigrid Dupin at University College Dublin.

Lefteris Zografos

Master's Student – Cognitive Neuroscience

Lefteris did his MSc thesis in the lab on reference frame transformations during tool use. Specifically, he was interested in how the represented location of touch on a tool (a tool-centered reference frame) is transformed in the an eye-centered representation. He simultaneously recorded localization behavior and EEG signals to characterize both the transformations and their electrophysiological correlates.

Tobias van der Gaag

Master's Student – Artificial Intelligence

Tobias completed his MSc thesis in the lab. His thesis project explored whether multisensory integration in peripersonal space reflects Bayesian causal inference. His project involved building a BCI model of visual-tactile integration in peripersonal space and using this model to fit psychophysical data.

Leo Pfiefer

Bachelor's Honours Student – Psychology

Leo did his Psychology Honours thesis in the lab. He was interested in how the brain represents the space of the body and of tools. His project investigated whether the representations of the arm and a hand-held tool merge together during tool-use.