Brain stimulation & neuroimaging

Humans interact with a world extremely rich in information, but their ability to process this information is limited. This underlines the need for a system capable of prioritising and selecting the most relevant information to achieve behavioural goals. This function of selecting particular stimuli while ignoring others has been called ‘attention’ and the study of its structural and functional correlates is one of the research axes of our group.

In basic and clinical work, we investigate the neural mechanisms underlying the spatial deployment of attention and how attention systems functionally reorganise under various circumstances (e.g. brain damage, brain stimulation, learning). We combine brain stimulation, neuroimaging and behavioural testing to address questions such as: what are the compensatory mechanisms underlying recovery of normal attentional processing after unilateral brain damage? We aim to better understand normal and pathological attentional processing and to design neurorehabilitation interventions for patients suffering from attention disorders.