People – Blank Lab

Principal Investigator

Helen Blank

I am interested in how prior expectations influence our perception during 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 Ruhr University Bochum. In addition, I lead projects within my Emmy Noether group on Prediction in Communication and the TRR289 at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. Before that, I was a Marie Curie fellow with Christian Büchel (also at the UKE). During my post-doc with Matt Davis at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK, I combined computational modelling and multivariate fMRI measurements to investigate how prior expectations improve 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.

PhD Students

Janika Becker

In her PhD, Janika is interested in statistical learning. Before that, she also wrote her Master’s thesis in our lab and did a pupil study to investigate how the pupil reacts to expected (and unexpected) auditory stimuli. She obtained her Master’s in Psychology from University Lübeck. In her PhD she explores how we learn prior expectations from auditory sequences, using pupillometry and EEG.

Mai-Carmen Requena-Komuro

Mai-Carmen is a postdoc in the joint project with Katja Wiech within the CRC 289 Treatment Expectation. She is interested in characterizing the cognitive and neural processes underlying brain diseases. She obtained her PhD in Clinical Neuroscience from University College London investigating subjective time perception in healthy aging and dementia under the supervision of Prof. Jason Warren at the Dementia Research Centre. After a short career break in research administration (grant management), she returned to academic research with a postdoctoral position on post-traumatic stress disorders at the Medical School Hamburg. As part of the CRC 289, she is conducting an fMRI study to investigate the impact of perceived warmth and competence on pain perception and expectation of treatment efficacy in the context of patient-practitioner interactions.

Fabian Schneider

Fabian is interested in predictive coding as a way of bridging the gaps between language comprehension, memory maintenance, and updating. Before joining the lab, he obtained a graduate degree in Cognitive Neuroscience from Radboud University and the Donders Institute as well as an undergraduate degree in Language, Literature, Culture from the University of Gießen. In his PhD, he aims to improve our understanding of how semantic priors are represented, used, and updated.

Philipp Schumann

Philipp is interested in how the human brain uses priors and contextual information in perceptual processes. Before joining the lab, he obtained his Master’s degree in Neurocognitive Psychology from the University of Oldenburg. He wrote his thesis in Gießen, using RSA to investigate the spatiotemporal dynamics of visual object aesthetics. In his PhD, he applies RSA to fMRI data to explore how verbally induced social priors affect the perception and interpretation of speech as part of the CRC 289 Treatment Expectation in collaboration with Katja Wiech.

Carina Ufer

Carina has a genuine interest in the predictive coding framework. She obtained a Master’s in Cognitive Science from the University of Vienna and a Bachelor’s in Applied Cognitive and Media Science from the University of Duisburg-Essen. In her PhD, she investigates the effect of voice priors on the perception of speech. She identified opposing serial dependence effects of stimulus and choice history in auditory vowel streams

Former Lab Members

Annika Garlichs

Annika is interested in how and to what extent prior information influences face perception. She obtained her Master’s in psychology focusing on cognitive neurosciences at the University Münster. She got her Bachelor in Psychology at Bielefeld University with a bachelor thesis about a case of congenital prosopagnosia, which started her interest in neuropsychological aspects of face perception. In her PhD, she uses RSA on fMRI data to understand how the human brain combines scene priors with faces.

Mark Lustig

Mark was a student assistant in the lab. He studies Psychology at the University Hamburg and currently conducts several pupil studies in the eyetracker lab.

Eylül Karabiber

Eylül was an intern in the lab and helped to collect data for pupil studies in the eye-tracker lab and contributed to a literature search on predictive sequences.