My work is situated in the realm of cognitive neuroscience with the aim of characterizing the cognitive and neural processes underlying human thinking, perception and action. My main area of research is numerical cognition in its broadest possible definition, comprising the perception of numerical information, its combination during mental arithmetic and its maintenance in short and long-term memory (STM; LTM). I started out in fundamental research with a focus on healthy adults and enlarged my scope over the years by (1) including participants from different age ranges between preschoolers and elderlies, and (2) trying to bridge the gap between laboratory and the ‘real world’ which may be characterized as ‘educational neuroscience’.
I am using a variety of different techniques and paradigms, including classical reaction time experiments, psychophysics, and functional neuroimaging (EEG and fMRI). In analyzing fMRI data, I use different approaches such as univariate and multivariate (e.g. multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA)), and effective connectivity. My work can broadly be divided into the following three topics, described in more detail below: (1) neurocognitive architecture of numerical information, (2) core processes underlying mental arithmetic, and (3) applying knowledge gathered in fundamental research in the field of education (from the lab to the classroom).
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