Melvin Eckert

I am fascinated by the role of feedback in the brain. While perception hinges on contextual feedback information to make sense of overwhelming sensory experiences, visual imagery - lacking any sensory experience - must be fully fed back throughout the cortex. Strikingly, for most of us, it is nonetheless possible to imagine things that are fully unrelated to our simultaneously perceived world. This might reflect separate, potentially parallel, feedback information streams that are relevant for contextual perceptual processing and visual imagery, which is what I want to investigate during my PhD using laminar fMRI. 

My PhD is shared between the Predictive Brain Lab and the Visual Cognitive Neuroscience Lab under Marius Peelen. Before starting my PhD in the two labs, I did a Bachelor's in Psychology, followed by a Research Master's in Cognitive Neuroscience - both at Maastricht University. For the latter, I did my thesis in the Predictive Brain Lab together with Lea-Maria Schmitt, investigating how high-dimensional visual similarity over time, as characterized with Deep Neural Networks, influences current visual processing. 

After a long day, I like spending evenings with friends, cooking together, playing table or card games, or watching movies. I also enjoy going to the cinema to watch new movies or old classics on the big screen.