Most people call me Alex, although the name my parents gave me is Jörn Alexander. Some people struggle with so I decided to shorten it a bit. Currently I work as post doc at ISTBI (Fudan University, Shanghai).

I received my PhD working with Rik Henson at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (University of  Cambridge). I was immensely honoured being part of the Gates Cambridge class of 2017 (click here for my profile). Receiving this scholarship was an enormous privilege and I hope that I will met the high expectation that come with it.

During my PhD, I was mainly interested in memory research to further understand what aspects of a situation makes us remember certain details better than others. This inluded work on novelty, surprise, prediction error.  In Cambridge I started using virtual reality (VR) as a tool to study cognition in humans in my experimental work, which provided me exciting opportunities to do previously impossible experiments.

For my post-doc position, my work will continue to focus on memory of various kinds (e.g. episodic & semantic) but I will also focus on cognitive maps and their relation to spatial/mental navigation as well as memory.

In past, I have also done work in related fields such as the effects of hormones on memory (e.g. stress effects) as well as the medial temporal lope and its function in visual working memory.

Open science is key to my work. My  understanding of open science transformed during my PhD time leaving me with clearer vision of how I want to contribute and share my work. Initially, I tried to keep diary of everything I did but this was clearly not sustainable. I therefore switched to write blog posts on things that took my a while to figure out myself and which might of interest to other people who might safe time because of it. Generally speaking,  I try to make as much of my work publically available as possible. If you visit my GitHub account, you will find some useful things like an R packages, scripts for experiments and various function (e.g. a popular function which draws a slider rating scale on the screen for Psychtoolbox 3).

If there is something that is not online yet (e.g. documentation), just drop me a message and I am trying to help.  If you have any other question, feel also free to contact me (see below).

 

 

Contact

Jörn Alexander Quent, PhD
ISTBI
Fudan University
E-Mail: alexander.quent (at) rub.de