Museum Prinsenhof in Delft made an overview exhibition of the works of Jan Schoonhoven. Jan Schoonhoven  (1914-1994) is regarded as one of the most important Dutch artists of the late twentieth century. He is recognized for his extensive and systematic investigations into light, form, and volume through his sculptural wall reliefs and works on paper. The perception of the wall reliefs strongly depends on their lighting - googling a specific relief one can see that the same work at one exhibition often looked completely different at another exhibition, due to lighting variations. However, this was never demonstrated at exhibitions of his works. We were asked to collaborate in the design of the exhibition in order to show such effects and explain the scientific backgrounds. We contributed with an interactive lighting installation (graduation project of Cris van Hoogdalem, supervised by Sylvia Pont) and two chapters (authored by Sylvia Pont) in the book with the exhibition “Look, Jan...

During my PhD I spend quite some time setting up a technical pipeline to generate stable, precise and realistic liquid stimuli. To be able to do this I followed a three months internship in Madrid at Next Limit. Here I learned to work with their particle simulation program RealFlow made for the VFX industry.

The computational costs of these stimuli are quite high. I wrote specific scripts to distribute the calculations over various systems and the university cluster. Over 50.000 images were generated showing liquids over time, with different viscosities and with different optical material appearances.

A video showing an overview of some of the stimuli used in my studies can be seen here.

I started working at the Laboratory for Neuro- and Psychophysiology, at KU Leuven, in October 2013, as a PRISM member. The first phase of the project has consisted of collecting electrophysiological data from the brains of two monkeys, in the prefrontal area 45B. Just last month I finished collecting the data from one of the monkeys and started with the second one. Most of these results were already shown in a poster and talk at the last PRISM meeting in Ankara. The process of looking for responsive and 2D stimulus-selective cells in the new monkey is underway, which I expect to be faster than with the first, since now I can capitalize on the experience I have acquired both in terms of experimental skill and in the familiarity with the particular area I am recording in. After a preliminary analysis of the data from the first monkey, I can now add a few extra tests to the experiment so that I can get more precise and reliable answers to the research question that motivated the...

It was a month prior to the PRISM meeting in Bordeaux that I joined Andrew Welchman’s lab in the University of Birmingham. At that time, most of the work presented during the meeting was new to me, but nonetheless very intriguing! Getting lots of ideas from the talks and posters and after chatting with the rest of ESRs and PIs, Andrew and I decided to follow an alternative approach towards the question “How do dorsal and ventral cortex interact in order to give us 3D perception?” by investigating the neural connections between these areas.

Before starting to collect my own data for this project, we decided that I should first spend some time to learn the ropes of brain imaging techniques and the relevant software for the analysis. Using fMRI, DTI and TMS for detecting the functional areas, mapping the white matter fibers and interrupting some brain connections respectively, we are able to gain a useful insight into the underlying connectivity between dorsal and ventral...