Major things happened in my life: professinally I finished my PhD in Cambridge (MRC CBU) and moved to China to work with Deniz Vatansever at Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-Inspired Intelligence (ISTBI), which is part of Fudan University, as a post doctoral fellow, which will give me an exciting change to broden my horizont.
My research focus in the next years will mainly be cognitive maps, spatial navigation and (declarative) memory, which I will study with various forms of virtual reality (VR). I will use this website to post semi-regular updates on these projects and posts some useful bits, codes and scripts that will help others to develop VR applications using unity.
Finally, I am glad to report two new publications:
First a review in Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, where we showed that usually novelty if defined as absent knowledge is associated with memory impairment. This is at odds (at least semantically) with various previous theorectial accounts but at closer inspection it becomes evident that many people use the word novelty when they mean surprise, which indeed is associated with memory enhancement.
Second a Registered Report in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, where we – in contrast to my personal expectation – did not find that experience something very novel (first-time use of VR) can enhance memory for material learned befor like it is observed for behavioural tagging.
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