I am interested in how prior expectations influence human cognition. How does the human brain integrate prior evidence from different sensory sources to make sense of new incoming information? I combine behavioural, neuroimaging, and computational methods to investigate how priors influence speech and person recognition.
I am a Professor of Predictive Cognition at the Faculty of Psychology, Ruhr University Bochum, and the Research Center One Health Ruhr of the University Alliance Ruhr. Additionally, I lead projects within my Emmy Noether group, focusing on Prediction in Communication, and the TRR 289 at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. Before that, I was a Marie Curie fellow with Christian Büchel (also at the UKE). During my postdoctoral work with Matt Davis at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK, I combined computational modeling and multivariate fMRI measurements to investigate how prior expectations enhance the perception of degraded speech. During my PhD with Katharina von Kriegstein at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, I investigated multisensory integration of faces and voices during human communication.