Lab Members
Principal Investigator
Surya Gayet
Surya is Assistant Professor in Experimental Psychology at Utrecht University, and the head of the CAP-Lab. He uses behavioral, computational, and neuroimaging methods to investigate human (visual) perception, consciousness, working memory, and attention.
Co Principal Investigator
Samson Chota
Sam is Assistant Professor in Experimental Psychology and Artificial Intelligence at Utrecht University, and co-PI of the CAP-Lab, where he supervises PhD students Kabir Arora, Dan Wang, and Xiaohua Bao together with Surya. He combines EEG with machine learning techniques and frequency tagging to investigate visual perception, attention, and working memory.
PhD Candidate
Andre Sahakian
Andre is a PhD candidate, supervised by Stefan van der Stigchel, Chris Paffen, and Surya Gayet. He uses online and lab-based behavioral methods and pupillometry to research naturalistic use of visual working memory.
PhD Candidate
Luzi Xu
Luzi is a PhD candidate supervised by Stefan van der Stigchel, Chris Paffen, and Surya Gayet. She uses online and lab-based behavioral methods to investigate how statistical learning influences conscious access, attentional selection, and working memory encoding.
PhD Candidate
Yichen Yuan
Yichen is a PhD candidate supervised by Nathan van der Stoep and Surya Gayet. He uses psychophysical and neuroimaging (EEG, 7T fMRI) methods to investigate working memory maintenance of multimodal (e.g., audio-visual) stimuli.
PhD Candidate
Liangyou Zhang
Liangyou is a PhD candidate supervised by Ben Harvey, Serge Dumoulin, and Surya Gayet. He uses 7T fMRI and population receptive field modeling to investigate the influence of attention on the processing of visual quantity (e.g., numerosity) in the human brain.
PhD Candidate
Kabir Arora
Kabir is a PhD candidate supervised by Samson Chota, Stefan van der Stigchel, Leon Kenemans and Surya Gayet. He uses rapid invisible frequency tagging (RIFT) and EEG to investigate the attentional shifts within visual working memory, and between visual working memory and perception.
PhD Candidate
Dan Wang
Dan Wang is a PhD candidate supervised by Samson Chota, Stefan van der Stigchel, and Surya Gayet. She uses behavioral methods and EEG to investigate how the influence of visual working memory on perception depends on the (attentional and representational) state of the memorized content.
PhD Candidate
Lasse Dietz
Lasse Dietz is a PhD candidate supervised by Samson Chota, Christoph Strauch, Stefan van der Stigchel, and Surya Gayet. He will combine invisible frequency tagging (RIFT) of EEG data with machine learning to investigate how visual working memory representations change over time, as a function of internal (e.g., strategy) and external (e.g., interference) factors.
Visiting PhD Candidate
Xiaohua Bao
Xiaohua is a PhD candidate at Tianjin Normal University, supervised by Yong Lyu, and visiting the lab for a year under the supervision of Surya Gayet and Samson Chota. She investigates the influence of visual working memory of real-world objects on conscious access, using behavioral methods and EEG.
Research Assistant
Marleen Abbestee
Marleen is working as a research assistant and as an intern in the lab, supervised by Surya Gayet. She uses 7T fMRI and machine learning techniques to investigate the distributed nature of visual working memory storage in the human brain; and she uses behavioral methods to study the role of attention in feature binding during visual working memory maintenance.
Former Lab Members
Former PhD Candidate
Giacomo Aldegheri
Giacomo was a PhD student at the Donders Institute, The Netherlands, supervised by Marius Peelen and Surya Gayet (graduated in 2023). He used fMRI and behavioral methods to investigate scene-based predictions in object perception. He is currently a postdoc at the University of Giessen.
Former PhD Candidate
Paul Zerr
Paul was a PhD student at Utrecht University, The Netherlands, supervised by Stefan van der Stigchel and Surya Gayet (graduated in 2022). He used eye-tracking and behavioral measures to investigate trans-saccadic perception, fragile memory, and visual working memory. He is currently a postdoc at the Donders Institute.
Former Postdoc & PhD Candidate
Myrthel Dogge
Myrthel was supervised by Surya Gayet (postdoc at Donders Institute, 2019-2020; PhD at Utrecht University, graduated in 2019). In her PhD, she used behavioral and EEG methods to study how the perceptual outcomes of our actions influence perception. During her postdoc, she studied unconscious arithmetic processing. She is currently Chief Editor at Nature Communications.
Former Research Assistant
Femke Ruijs
After completing her Neuroscience & Cognition research master at Utrecht University, Femke joined the lab as a research assistant supervised by Surya Gayet. She used 7T fMRI and machine learning techniques to investigate visual working memory storage in the human brain, as a function of the attentional state of the memory content.
Former Research Assistant
Cees van Middelkoop
After completing his masters in data science, Cees joined the lab as a research assistant supervised by Surya Gayet in 2022-2023. He used deep neural networks to investigate the role of scene-context on object recognition in human and machine vision. He is currently a data scientist at TNO.
Former Research Assistant
Laura van Zantwijk
Laura joined the lab as a research assistant supervised by Surya Gayet in 2022-2023. She helped conducting literature search, helped collecting existing fMRI datasets and stimulus sets, and built this website. She is currently enrolled in the Neuroscience & Cognition research master's program at Utrecht University.
Former Research Assistant
Mariska Peeters
Mariska joined the lab as a research assistant supervised by Surya Gayet in 2021-2022. She helped setting up and running behavioral and fMRI studies for the Veni-funded project "Finding objects in natural scenes". She stayed in the lab to do her Cognitive Neuroscience research master's thesis (Donders Institute, Radboud University), and is currently a data analyst at Breinstein.
Former Intern
Süheyla Aydemir
Süheyla joined the lab as an intern in 2023, as she visited Utrecht University for her Erasmus Exchange program. Under the supervision of Surya, she investigated the mediating role of attention in the binding of object features in short-term memory. She is currently doing an internship at the VisionLab at Boğaziçi University, Turkey.