Josipa Alilović

I started my PhD at the Department of Psychology at the University of Amsterdam in November 2016 under the joint supervision of dr. Simon van Gaal and prof. dr. Heleen Slagter (Cognition and Plasticity laboratory). In my PhD project, I investigate distinct electrophysiological stages of visual information processing leading to visual perception and conscious access. Furthermore, I study the effects of top-down attention and prediction in shaping visual information processing and the extent to which perception is determined by the ability to attend to and to form expectations about visual inputs. To shed light on this, I combine visual psychophysical paradigms with EEG recordings of brain activity, thus achieving millisecond precision in describing neural processes of interest, supplemented with ERP, time-frequency, and decoding analyses (MVPA).

Before starting my PhD, I studied Brain and Cognitive Sciences (MSc) at the University of Amsterdam and Psychology (MA) at the University of Zagreb. During my first research internship, under the supervision of prof. dr. Heleen Slagter, I studied the effects of attention and prediction on the first feedforward sweep of cortical information processing. During my second internship, supervised by dr. Johannes Fahrenfort, I investigated whether attention can be allocated to natural object categories even when they are not consciously perceived.