Floortje Bouwkamp

During a successful career as both an artist and entrepreneur, I developed a profound interest in the neural mechanisms underlying visual perception that lead me to my current efforts.

After graduating with a Cum Laude degree in Psychology, track Brain & Cognition at the University of Amsterdam I moved to Nijmegen where I graduated, again Cum Laude,  from the Masters Programme in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Donders Institute. I joined the predictive brain lab for my second year internship and during that year I was awarded with an NWO research talent grant to pursue a PhD.

Identifying objects in cluttered scenes under constantly varying conditions is an astonishing human ability. My research focuses on if and how we can automatically and implicitly learn predictable structure in our environment. And how this predictability is used by our brain to facilitate subsequent perceptual processing, completely outside of our awareness. Can we learn from our environment even when we are not paying attention? And what are the neural underpinnings of these processes? I am trying to find asnwers to these questions under direct supervision of Eelke Spaak.

Though hooked on neuroscience, I also really enjoy crossfit, drawing, and travelling with my family.