PhD candidate in Cognitive Neuroimaging: Relating the human brain?s responses to stimulus timing across the senses (1.0 FTE)

We are seeking a highly motivated PhD candidate to investigate the human brain's responses to the timing of events in different sensory modalities using advanced analyses of ultra-high-field (7T) fMRI data. The project will focus on presenting multisensory stimuli of varying timing in the scanner and developing model-based analyses of the resulting fMRI responses. The selected candidate will be supervised by Dr Ben Harvey at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. This is a research position for four years, fully funded by an NWO VIDI Grant recently awarded to Dr Harvey. The starting date is between September and November 2018.

Job tasks

Completion and defence of a PhD thesis within four years, containing at least 4 peer-reviewed articles; Designing experiments, coordinating and conducting data collection, analysing resulting data; Presentation of results at national and international scientific conferences; Participation in training programmes and expert meetings scheduled for the project; Teaching (10% of time).

The research builds on the following studies:

Harvey, B.M., Klein, B.P., Petridou, N., and Dumoulin, S.O. (2013). Topographic representation of numerosity in the human parietal cortex. Science, 341, 1123-1126.

Harvey, B.M., Fracasso, A., Petridou, N., and Dumoulin, S.O. (2015). Topographic representations of object size and relationships with numerosity reveal generalized quantity processing in human parietal cortex. PNAS, 112, 13525-13530.

Harvey, B.M., and Dumoulin, S.O. (2017). A network of topographic numerosity maps in human association cortex. Nature Human Behaviour, 1, 36.

Harvey, B.M., Ferri, S., Orban, G.A. (2017) Comparing parietal quantity-processing Mechanisms between humans and macaques. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21, 779-793.

Harvey B.M., Dumoulin S.O. (2017) Can responses to basic non-numerical visual features explain neural numerosity responses? Neuroimage, 149, 200-209.