Decision and Awareness group (head: Dr. Igor Kagan) is affiliated with the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory (CNL) of Prof. Stefan Treue. The group was established in April 2011 in collaboration with the Department of Cognitive Neurology of Prof. Melanie Wilke, University Medicine Goettingen (UMG), and we continue a close collaboration with the Cognitive Neurology group at the DPZ.
Our research aims to understand the neural basis of spatial awareness and visuomotor coordination and decision making: the ability to perceive and to act adequately in response to multiple external sensory events, exhibiting a flexible behavior in face of several alternatives. Our current work is focusing on pulvinar, pulvinar-cortical, and bihemispheric processing underlying decision-making in the context of goal-directed eye and hand movements, using behavioral experiments, neurophysiology, causal interference (inactivation, microstimulation) and functional imaging. We are combining these complementary approaches to study these functions on the local (neuronal) and global (network) levels. We also perform comparative human-macaque behavioral, intracranial recording, and neuroimaging studies.
Cooperations
Alex Gail, Julia Fischer, Nivi Mani, Viola Priesemann, Anne Schacht, Stefan Treue, Hans Scherberger, Fred Wolf: Sonderforschungsbereichs 1528 Cognition of Interaction
Arezoo Pooresmaeili (University of Southampton, UK): Individual and social effort judgements, value-based decision-making
Caspar Schwiedrzik (DPZ and Ruhr University Bochum): Intracranial EEG in human patients, effector-specific learning, resting-state fMRI and pharmacological inactivation
Jean-Claude Dreher ('Neuroeconomics, Reward and Decision making' group, CNRS, Lyon, France): Computational mechanisms of social learning and coordination
Jorge Jaramillo (University of Chicago, USA): Modeling bihemispheric thalamo-cortical networks
Vassilios Christopoulos (University of Southern California, USA): Modeling parallel plan encoding during countermanding tasks
Chris Klink (Utrecht University, Netherlands), Kelly Shen (Simon Fraser University, Canada), and PRIME-DRE consortium: Macaque connectome
