Post-doctoral Cognitive Neuroscientist - Spatiotemporal Interferences in Prospective and...

Applications are invited for a full-time post-doctoral cognitive neuroscientist in the European consortium “Extended-personal reality: augmented recording and transmission of virtual senses through artificial-intelligence” (see abstract p.2). EXPERIENCE involves eight academic and industrial partners with complementary expertise in artificial intelligence, neuroscience, psychiatry, neuroimaging, MEG/EEG/physiological recording techniques, and virtual-reality. The postdoctoral position will be fully dedicated to the Scientific foundation for the Extended-Personal Reality, a work package lead by the CEA (Virginie van Wassenhove ) in collaboration with Univ. of Pisa (Gaetano Valenza , Mateo Bianchi ), Padova (Claudio Gentilli ), Roma Tor Vergata (Nicola Toschi ) and others…

The candidates will have significant experience using time-resolved neuroimaging techniques (EEG, MEG), a solid research record in cognitive neurosciences, psychology and/or related fields, and some knowledgeable interest in exploring (spatio)temporal cognition in virtual reality. The selected postdoctoral fellow will be located at Neurospin and work collaboratively with the experts of the consortium. The postdoctoral fellow will be responsible for the development and transfer of knowledge, will contribute to the validation of novel experimental protocols, their implementation with combined virtual reality and neuroimaging, and state-of-the art analyses approaches. He/she will benefit from the interdisciplinary collaboration, and will be scientifically central to the advancement of the project. He/she will be involved in the organizational and managerial aspects of the project, including the supervision of students, the organization of meetings and project reports.

Post-Doctoral Project

Spatiotemporal Interferences in Prospective and Retrospective Experiences of Time

The human spatial navigation system (the so-called ‘GPS’ of the brain) encompasses hippocampal brain structures and provides a flexible internal mapping of a subject's spatial position with respect to its environmental landmarks. These structures are involved in spatial navigation and episodic memory. However, very little is known regarding how time is perceived during navigation and episodic encoding: are temporal experiences (e.g. order, duration, speed) compressed in memory like any other informational content? Is time lost and reconstructed a posteriori? Does this reconstruction also support our experience of time in real-time? We will bring temporal distortions to VR, explore spatio-temporal interferences and see how they affect mental mapping.