Our methods
Our methods
Meet the team
We are a research group at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (School of Clinical Medicine), and Department of Psychology (School of Biological Sciences), at the University of Cambridge
Programme Leader
Alex Woolgar
I am Professor of Integrative and Systems Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at University of Cambridge and also the Deputy Director of the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (Cambridge). I am fascinated by how the activity of billions of cells in our brains gives rise to our ability to perceive, think, and act. I especially want to understand the brain mechanisms that enable humans to pay attention - underpinning our ability to behave in complex, diverse, and flexible ways. To study this I draw on a range of human brain imaging and stimulation techniques, and develop approaches that push the limits of what we can ask about how the brain works. I am honoured to get to work with the brilliant bunch of scientists below.
Jade Jackson
Research Associate
I use a combination of neurostimulation (TMS) and neuroimaging (fMRI/MEG/EEG) techniques to investigate selective attention and rule-guided behaviour in the human brain. I have looked at how task-relevant information is prioritised in the brain (e.g., Jackson et al. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2017; Jackson et al. Imaging Neuroscience, 2025), and the causal influence of disrupting this prioritisation on information coding across the brain (Jackson et al., Comms Bio, 2021). My current work focuses on the temporal dynamics of cognitive control, enhancement and inhibition, neurostimulation methods (Jackson* Scrivener* et al., JoNM, 2025), and using neurostimulation combined with neuroimaging to causally link information coding to behaviour.
Elizabeth Michael
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Given the variability of our visual world, flexibility in how we process sensory information is a critical feature of efficient perception. My research focuses on how the visual system responds to different types of challening environment, using concurrnent brain stimulation and neuroimaging to identify the neural processes that support this behaviour. In parallel, I am interested in how the efficacy of interventions (e.g. behavioural training, brain stimulation) interacts with individual differences in neural architecture and function.
Hannah Rapaport
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
The aim of my research is to develop novel methods for assessing the language abilities of autistic people who have no or minimal spoken language.
I completed my PhD at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. My research involved using paediatric magnetoencephalography (MEG) to investigate the neural basis of sensory perception in autistic and neurotypical children.
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I am passionate about doing research that will be of benefit to the autism community.
Lydia Barnes
Research Fellow
I study how we generalise what we know so that we can perform in new environments. I'm interested in how attention -- selecting and prioritising parts of sensory information -- relates to that ability to generalise. I try to understand this through people's actions in very basic computer games, through questions about how they think, and through non-invasive recordings of brain activity (EEG/MEG).
Moataz Assem
Wellcome Trust Early Career Fellow
Moataz investigates working memory brain circuits. His research aims to understand how we “actively” focus on limited information while also maintaining a broader "hidden" cognitive background. To this end, he utilizes innovative combinations of advanced techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), electrocorticography (ECoG), and precision functional MRI (fMRI), alongside anatomical data from non-human primates. This multimodal approach holds significant implications for circuit-based clinical interventions. Moataz is collaborating with top institutions globally, including Northwestern University, Washington University in St. Louis, the Stem Cell and Brain Research Institute/INSERM in Lyon, and the University of Oxford.
Nadene Dermody
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
My research uses multivariate pattern analysis of fMRI and MEG data to study how selective attention processes manifest in the brain, with a particular focus on understanding how frontoparietal "multiple-demand" (MD) regions might facilitate selective attention and goal-directed behaviour more broadly. My work investigates the neural mechanisms of selective attention in young healthy adults, and more recently has looked at how these processes might change following focal brain damage. I am also interested in the link between the MD system and fluid intelligence, and whether (and how) cognitive processes affected by non-MD damage might nonetheless be supported by this system.
Maya Inbar
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
At the intersection of cognitive neuroscience, attention research, linguistic typology (the study of what's where & why in the world's languages) and language in interaction, my research focuses on how the brain dynamically processes and produces spontaneous spoken language. My current work aims to integrate theoretical insight and methods from these fields to study receptive language processing of autistic people with no or minimal spoken language.
Yuena Zheng
PhD Candidate
We live in a world flooded with information, yet our cognitive resources are limited, meaning that only a small amount of information is attended to and processed in depth over a period of time. I am interested in the neural mechanisms behind this selective attention, especially for the top-down control dominated by the PFC and driven by the current task goal. My current project aims to use MEG and computational modelling to investigate the dynamic neural representation of the PFC in the presence of visual competition and the information flow between the PFC and the visual cortex during this process.
Chentianyi Yang
PhD Candidate
It is estimated that 30% of children with autism are minimally verbal. Traditional clinical tools have struggled to distinguish the exact stages of linguistic or motor processing at which they have difficulties to express their thoughts through speaking. In my project, I will tackle this problem by investigating the mathematical functions of the brain using cortical entrainment. By analysing brain imaging data (e.g. EEG and MEG) and the predictions of automatic speech recognition models, I will bring new insights into the pathways of language processing for both autistic and neurotypical brains.
Yi Li
PhD Candidate
About one-third of autistic individuals have limited functional speech, often using fewer than 30 words or simple phrases in spontaneous communication. The reasons behind this are complex and not fully understood, partly due to the limitations of traditional language and cognitive assessments in reliably measuring their abilities. Emerging evidence suggests that they may have intact receptive language skills, raising the question of why their spoken language production is impaired. Using non-invasive human neuroimaging (e.g. EEG and MEG), my research aims to examine the disrupted cognitive processes in the language comprehension-to-production pathways in non-speaking autism.
Runhao Lu
PhD Candidate
A distributed "multiple-demand" (MD) network across the frontoparietal brain regions is thought to be crucial for human intelligent behaviours because of its incredible function to flexibly and adaptively process task-relevant information. Although this network is commonly co-activated during demanding tasks, potential functional differentiation among MD regions have long been discussed but no clear consensus yet. My research aims to use M/EEG, concurrent TMS-fMRI and TMS-EEG to causally examine the distinct contributions of the individual MD regions. In particular, I ask whether these regions work differently in terms of enhancement vs inhibition during selective processing of visual information.
Lab Alumni
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Erin Goddard (ARC DECRA, University of New South Wales, Sydney)
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Amanda Robinson (ARC DECRA, University of Sydney)
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Nathan Caurana (Macquarie University, Sydney)
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Kimberley Weldon (University of Minnesota, USA)
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Annelli Janssen (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen)
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Catriona Scrivener (University of Edinburgh)
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Hamid Karimi-Rouzbahani (ARC DECRA, Mater, Brisbane)
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Christopher Whyte (University of Sydney, Australia)
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Dorian Minors
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Yuanjun Kong (Beijing Normal University, China)
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Sichao Liu (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)
Collaborators
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Anina N. Rich (Macquarie University, Sydney)
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John Duncan (University of Cambridge)
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Eva Feredoes (University of Reading)
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Jason Mattingley (Queensland Brain Institute)
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Nicholas Badcock (University of Western Australia)
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Andrew Thwaites (University College London)