COOL
Mechanisms of conscious and unconscious learning
Ph.D. Student
(WP7)
Anne Atas is a PhD student (FNRS and IAP grants) supervised by Axel Cleeremans (Consciousness, Cognition and Computation Group; Center for Research in Cognition & Neurosciences). She studies the extent to which learning and control mechanisms may occur without conscious awareness. In addition, she investigates the influence of several temporal and sequential factors (e.g. prime-target SOA, prime duration, reaction time fluctuations, trial sequence) on low-level and high-level control mechanisms occurring during conflict tasks. She is also particularly interested in dissociating the perceptual and motor origin of control mechanisms during conflict.
ULBLABTom Beckers is professor of psychology at KU Leuven. After obtaining a PhD from KU Leuven in 2002, he was a postdoc and visiting assistant professor at KU Leuven, Binghamton University (US) and UCLA (US), before joining the Department of Clinical Psychology at the University of Amsterdam as an assistant professor in 2008. An NWO Vidi laureate in 2009, he returned to KU Leuven as an associate professor of research in 2010. Meanwhile, he remains an affiliated faculty member of the Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam and the Department of Clinical Psychology at the University of Amsterdam. Tom Beckers’ research addresses the fundamental mechanisms of elementary learning and memory processes in humans (including children) and animals (classical conditioning and instrumental learning, causal learning, memory formation and reconsolidation). He also has a strong interest in the role of learning and memory processes in various forms of psychopathology, most notably anxiety disorders, addiction and appetitive disorders, and ADHD. In recent years, his work was funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), the Hercules Foundation, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, UK), the KU Leuven Research Fund, and the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO). Tom Beckers is editor for Experimental Psychology, associate editor for Frontiers in Cognition, and editorial board member for Acta Psychologica, Frontiers in Psychopathology, and Frontiers in Comparative Psychology.
KULLABPost-Doctoral Researcher
(WP2)
Yannick Boddez defended his doctoral dissertation on “Stimulus competition in associative learning: Basic processes and a model for fear generalization”, under supervision of Prof. Dr. Tom Beckers and Prof. Dr. Frank Baeyens, in March 2012. He completed his doctoral studies in the Centre for the Psychology of Learning and Experimental Psychopathology (KU Leuven, Belgium), where he is also currently employed as a postdoc. Yannick Boddez' (mainly experimental) research revolves around developing a better understanding of cognitive processes in associative learning, with a special focus on future clinical applications. Representative research interests include generalization and biased time perception in human fear learning.
KULLABAs of today, Guillermo Borragán is starting his second year of a Ph.D. student in the Neuropsychology & Functional Neuroimaging Research Unit (UR2NF) belonging to the “Centre de Recherche Cognition & Neurosciences” (CRCN). Among his interests stands out the brain reorganization and plasticity that is involved in the acquisition of expertise in motor learning as well as the study of the brain mechanisms supporting automatic responses. He is currently working under the supervision of Philippe Peigneux and Axel Cleermans.
ULBLABSenne Braem is a Postdoctoral Researcher for the IUAP at Ghent University (Department of Experimental Psychology) where he works for the labs of Prof. Dr. Marcel Brass and Prof. Dr. Jan De Houwer. For his doctoral thesis, Senne performed research on the topics of cognitive control and reinforcement learning (supervised by Wim Notebaert), where he was not only interested in investigating interactions between both, but also in re-interpreting cognitive control phenomena in terms of reinforcement learning principles. He has a research background in cognitive psychology, but also acquired EEG experience during his stay at the Humboldt University of Berlin (Germany) with Prof. Dr. Birgit Stürmer, and fMRI expertise during his collaboration with Dr. Tobias Egner at Duke University, Durham, NC (US). Together with Prof. Dr. Marcel Brass and Prof. Dr. Jan De Houwer, Senne now studies the neural underpinnings of instructed learning and its role in domains such as fear conditioning, cognitive control, and memory formation.
UGENTLABMarcel Brass is research professor for cognitive neuroscience at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University. His research is related to the role of the prefrontal cortex in cognitive and intentional control of behaviour. He also investigates the interface of social and motor cognition. His recent research focuses on the influence of high-level beliefs on basic motor-cognitive processes. Furthermore, he investigates how verbally instructed behaviour can be implemented in the motor system.
UGENTLABAssociated Partner
(WP8)
Fabienne Chetail is assistant professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Lab Cognition Language & Development LCLD; Centre for Research in Cognition & Neurosciences CRCN). After a Ph.D on the role of syllables in reading, she started working with Alain Content on the orthographic processing of words and on the impact of the consonant-vowel structure of letter strings. She examined these issues both in adults and in children, using behavioural and EEG paradigms. More generally, she is interested in the mechanisms of word perception and in the development of the sensitivity to regularities in real and artificial stimuli. For more information, please visit my website: http://fchetail.ulb.ac.be.
ULBLABAxel Cleeremans is a Research Director with the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (F.R.S.-FNRS) and a professor of Cognitive Psychology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where he heads the Consciousness, Cognition and Computation (CO3) Group. His research is essentially dedicated to the differences between information processing with and without consciousness, particularly in the domain of learning and memory, and more recently in the domains of perception, social cognition, and cognitive control. Cleeremans argues that consciousness is the result of unconscious learning mechanisms through which the brain continuously redescribes its interactions with itself, with the the world and with other people to itself. Cleeremans has acted as president of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology and is a board member of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. A member of the Royal Academy of Belgium, he is also Field Editor-in-Chief of Frontiers in Psychology. Axel Cleeremans has authored and edited several books as well as numerous articles dedicated to consciousness. He has recently edited, together with Tim Bayne and Patrick Wilken, the "Oxford Companion to Consciousness".
ULBLABIrene Cogliati Dezza is a PhD student (UNI and IAP grants) supervised by Axel Cleeremans (Consciousness, Cognition and Computation Group; Center for Research in Cognition & Neurosciences). She studies decision-making process in the light of “Exploration and Exploitation dilemma” (updating old strategies vs. maintaining) in both healthy and clinical population. One of her main interests is to investigate the role of top-down influences on this decision process.
ULBLABAssociated Partner
(WP8)
Alain Content is a Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the Université libre de Bruxelles, where he teaches in psycholinguistics and cognition and heads the Laboratoire Cognition, Langage & Développement (LCLD). The research program of the LCLD concerns the interactions of human cognition with natural language and its development using behavioral experimental techniques with normally developing children, children with cognitive or sensory developmental impairments and adult participants, as well as neuroimaging techniques (ERP, fMRI). Major current themes of interest concern language development on the one hand, and numerical cognition on the other hand: language processing across modalities; spoken and printed word recognition processes; written language acquisition disorders (dyslexias/dysgraphias); language development in hearing-impaired persons; bilingualism and second language acquisition; relationships between early preverbal numerical abilities and later mathematical skills.
ULBLABPh.D. Student
(WP2)
I am a PhD student at the Centre for the Psychology of Learning and Experimental Psychopathology (CLEP, KU Leuven, Belgium). My promotor is Prof. Dr. Tom Beckers and my co-promotors are Prof. Dr. Jan De Houwer (UGent, Belgium) and Prof. Dr. Teresa McCormack (Queen’s University Belfast, UK). The subject of my PhD project is Pavlovian-to-Instrumental Transfer as a tool to probe the acquisition of behavioral control in children and adults. The goal of my project is to investigate the mechanisms of PIT in adults and assess its developmental trajectory in children.
KULLABPost-Doctoral Researcher
(WP8)
Adélaïde de Heering is a postdoctoral research fellow working at UNESCOG/CRCN under the supervision of Pr. Régine Kolinsky. After her PhD in the Face Categorization Lab at the University of Louvain-La-Neuve (Pr. Bruno Rossion) where she studied the development of the face processing system mainly with children and adults, she moved for two years at McMaster University (Canada) to pursue her work on the plasticity of this system with Pr. Daphne Maurer. When she came back to the Face Categorization Lab under a FNRS fellowship, she created a Baby Lab which aim was to investigate, thank to the EEG technique, how infants process and recognize faces and how they differentiate them from objects. Currently she is developing new paradigms to better understand what is the cost and/or the benefit of having developed a natural expertise with faces. She will also investigate the competition observed in a brain deprived of visual inputs.
ULBLABJan De Houwer is a Professor of Psychology at Ghent University (Belgium) where he heads the Learning and Implicit Processes Laboratory. His research is related to the manner in which spontaneous (automatic) preferences are learned and can be measured. Regarding the learning of preferences, he focuses on the role of stimulus pairings (associative learning). With regard to the measurement of preferences, he developed new reaction time measures and examined the processes underlying various measures. Jan De Houwer (co-)authored more than 190 publications in international journals including “Psychological Bulletin” and “Behavioral and Brain Sciences”. He was co-editor of the journal “Cognition and Emotion” and is a member of the editorial board of several journals including “Journal of Experimental Psychology: General”.
UGENTLABZoltan Dienes is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Sussex. He has written over one hundred publications on the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious. He has argued that the unconscious status of knowledge, as gained by implicit learning or subliminal perception, is best determined by subjective measures, i.e. metacognitive measures of the awareness of the mental state one is in. He has investigated the acquisition of unconscious knowledge in artificial grammars, poetry, music, dynamic systems control, and perceptual-motor skills. For example, he has investigated the algorithm by which people intercept ballistic objects (catch cricket balls) and how this knowledge is unconscious. He has explored the strengths and weaknesses of connectionist models of implicit learning. He has also proposed a theory of hypnosis according to which hypnotic action consists in inaccurate awareness of intentions. He is pursuing simple ways of implementing Bayesian statistics to overcome problems in current orthodox inferential methods. He has authored two books, one on implicit learning and the other on the philosophy of science and statistics.
SUSSEXLABPatrick Haggard trained in experimental psychology in Cambridge, and then did a postdoc in Oxford. He has been at UCL since 1995. He leads the "Action and Body" research group at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London. His research generally combines the study of brain mechanisms and subjective experience. He has two current research interests: voluntary action and bodily awareness. He has a wide network of collaborations nationally and internationally, with psychologists, neurologists, engineers and artists.
UCL.UKLABRégine Kolinsky is Research Director with the National Fund for Scientific Research (FRS-FNRS), Belgium, and professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where she heads the Research Unit in Cognitive Neurosciences (UNESCOG). Her main research themes are speech perception in typical and atypical conditions and populations, the cognitive and brain consequences of literacy and schooling, and the interactions between speech and music. She authored four books as well as about 150 articles and chapters of books, many in prestigious Journals like Science, Brain, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and Cognition.
ULBLABPost-Doctoral Researcher
(WP1)
Aliette Lochy is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Face Categorization Lab at University of Louvain-La-Neuve. After her PhD in the field of numerical processing, she worked in neuropsychology (case and group-studies) and acquisition of the symbolic number system in children (Universitätsklinik Innsbruck, Austria). She then acquired a deeper knowledge on learning and plasticity issues with fMRI training studies (FC Donders Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Netherlands). Currently she is working in the general field of learning and visual expertise, and more specifically studying the relationships between two visual expertise domains: reading and face processing. She approaches this issue through acquisition studies in children, EEG studies in adults, and localization studies in left-handers.
UCLLABPh.D. Student
(WP4)
Pete has a 1st class BSc in Neuroscience with Cognitive Science from Sussex University. His undergraduate project investigated the relationship between hypnotisability, meditation and the timing of the subjective experience of volition in a simple motor action. Under the supervision of Zoltan Dienes and Ryota Kanai, he will investigate hypnosis and meditation with the goal of increasing our understanding of aspects of the sense of agency and their neural correlates.
SUSSEXPh.D. Student
(WP3)
Gaëtan Mertens is currently working on his PhD project about learning via instructions in the Department of Experimental-Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University. His supervisors are professors Jan De Houwer and Marcel Brass. Gaëtan obtained his Master´s degree in Experimental Psychology from Ghent University in 2012. His current interests include: human associative and non-associative learning, instructional learning and electrophysiological measures of learning.
UGENTLABPhilippe Peigneux is PhD in Psychological Sciences (2000; University of Liège [ULg], Belgium), tenure professor of Clinical Neuropsychology and currently Francqui Research Professor (2013-2016) at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. He is also the director of the ULB Neuropsychology and Functional Neuroimaging Research Unit (UR2NF) affiliated at the Centre de Recherches Cognition et Neurosciences (CRCN) and at the ULB Neurosciences Institute (UNI). Philippe Peigneux is active in sleep and memory research since 1996 and published more than 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals. His research is mainly but not exclusively focused on investigating the relationships between sleep and memory consolidation processes, and in a wider perspective the interrelationships between cognitive processes and vigilance states, including sleep and biological rhythms, both in healthy and pathological conditions (sleep and circadian disorders, disorders of consciousness, developmental disorders [dysphasia, ADHD], epileptic disorders, degenerative diseases [Parkinson, Alzheimer], …), in adulthood and across children development. A specific focus is made on the processes by which novel representations are created and novel information consolidated in long-term memory. Studies are primarily conducted using behavioural and cognitive approaches, and advanced functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) and Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS), electroencephalography (EEG) and magneto-encephalography (MEG) techniques. Philippe Peigneux is a member of the National Committee for Psychological Sciences at the Royal Academy of Belgium, and the current President of the European Sleep Research Society (http://www.esrs.eu).
ULBLABBruno Rossion is associate researcher at the National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) in Belgium, at the University of Louvain. His research aims at understanding human face recognition. He has authored over 120 scientific publications in international peer-reviewed journals on this topic, using a diversity of approaches: behavioral measures (psychophysics), human electrophysiology (ERPs, EEG), neuroimaging (PET, fMRI), the recording of eye movements, single-case studies of brain-damage patients (prosopagnosia), behavioral and EEG studies of infants and children, and human intracerebral recordings and electrical stimulations.
UCLLABPh.D. Student
(WP7)
Estibaliz San Antón was associated with COOL during academic year 2012-2013 and is currently an F.R.S.-FNRS research assistant. She is pursuing her PhD project about the dynamics of the relationships during learning between behavior and consciousness at the Center for Cognition & Neurosciences at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her supervisor is professor Axel Cleeremans and her co-supervisor is Arnaud Destrebecqz. Estibaliz obtained her degree in Psychology from Deusto University (Spain) in 2010, and a Master´s degree in Neuropsychology from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 2012. Her current interests include: human associative and statistical learning, contextual cueing in infants and consciousness.
ULBLABPh.D. Student
(WP6)
Nura Sidarus completed her masters at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, where she is currently doing a PhD. She works with Prof. Patrick Haggard, in the Action and Body Group, studying the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the Sense of Agency. Her broader research interests lie around the topics of consciousness, self and action awareness.
UCL.UKLABPh.D. Student
(WP5)
Martijn Teuchies is currently a PhD student at Ghent University in the department of experimental psychology under the supervision of prof. dr. Marcel Brass. Here he participates in a project on the Interactions of conscious and unconscious processes in decision making. Before coming to Ghent Martijn studied cognitive neuroscience in the Netherlands at Leiden University, in the lab of prof. dr. Bernhard Hommel. As part of the Master’s program Martijn spent three months at the Technische Universität in Dresden working with dr. Hannes Ruge and dr. Uta Wolfensteller on rapid instructed task learning as well as three months at Ghent University working on task switching with prof. dr. Marcel Brass.
UGENTLAB