Raphael Anstett

I am interested in how knowledge is organized in the brain and how we navigate through it. I am fascinated by the idea of conceptual cognitive maps which propose that learned concepts are organized in a spatial way similarly to maps of our physical world. This idea is supported by overlapping neural mechanisms in the human brain for spatial and conceptual knowledge. However, concepts and knowledge are complex and can hardly always be reduced to only two or three dimensions. The goal of my internship is to understand how we access high dimensional semantic knowledge and how context can have an effect on its representation. We are approaching this first with behavioral paradigms and later also fMRI.

I am currently a Masters Student in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Centre for Mind/Brain sciences (CIMeC) at the University of Trento. Before this I pursued a Bachelor in Cognitive Science at the University of Tübingen with a strong focus on Machine Learning and AI. I had first contact with the idea of cognitive maps during a research internship at the DoellerLab at the MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig. Wanting to know more about it, I did another internship on similar topics with Prof. Roberto Bottini at CIMeC.

In my free time, I like to run (if possible in mountains), cycle, play squash or strategical board games.