CAP Lab

Surya is Assistant Professor in Experimental Psychology at Utrecht University, and head of the CAP-Lab. He uses behavioral, physiological, computational, and neuroimaging methods (fMRI, EEG) to investigate human (visual) perception, consciousness, working memory, and attention.

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 Lasse Dietz together with Surya. He combines EEG with machine learning techniques and frequency tagging to investigate visual perception, attention, and working memory.

Andre is currently a postdoc working on the NWO-funded citizen science project "LerenKijken.nl". Before that, he did his PhD under the supervision of Stefan van der Stigchel, Chris Paffen, and Surya Gayet. Using online and lab-based behavioral methods and pupillometry, he studied the naturalistic use of visual working memory.

Yichen is a PhD candidate supervised by Nathan van der Stoep, Ben Harvey, and Surya Gayet. He uses psychophysical and neuroimaging (EEG, 7T fMRI) methods to investigate working memory maintenance of multimodal (e.g., audio-visual) stimuli.

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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.

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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) with EEG to investigate shifts of attention (within visual working memory, between visual working memory and perception, and during perception).

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Dan Wang is a PhD candidate supervised by Samson Chota, Stefan van der Stigchel, and Surya Gayet. She uses behavioral methods and EEG (rapid invisible frequency tagging; RIFT) to investigate the joint influences of top-down (goal-directed) and bottom-up factors on early visual processing.​

Lasse Dietz is a PhD candidate supervised by Samson Chota, Christoph Strauch, Stefan van der Stigchel, and Surya Gayet. He combines rapid invisible frequency tagging (RIFT) of EEG data with machine learning to investigate how visual working memory and attention change over time, as a function of internal (e.g., strategy) and external (e.g., interference) factors.

Ruifei Zhong is a PhD candidate at the Spinoza Centre for Neuroimaging, supervised by Ben Harvey, Serge Dumoulin, and Surya Gayet. He uses 7T fMRI and population receptive field modeling to investigate working memory across (auditory and visual) modalities, for both simplistic and real-world stimuli, and during mental transformations.

Emily Vierthaler is a research assistant, working with Surya Gayet on a review / opinion paper about (visual) working memory, and contributing to grant writing. She is also doing her internship under supervision of Kabir, where she uses Rapid Invisible Frequency Tagging (RIFT) with EEG, to track attention across multiple moving objects.

Tord Helliesen is a research assistent, mainly supervised by Samson Chota, who helps out with data collection for various lab members (Lasse, Dan, Kabir, Sam). He specializes in EEG-based RIFT recordings combined with eye-tracking.

Rosalie Eikenhorst is a research assistant, working with Surya Gayet and Yichen Yuan on a behavioral experiment investigating the fundamental organizational principles of working memory maintenance: specifically, we ask whether temporal information is predominantly stored auditorily, whereas spatial information is predominantly stored visually.

Maxim Kurvink is a research assistant working with Surya Gayet. His research project involves serial dependency, the phenomenon whereby current memory reports are biased by previous ones. To do so, he uses psychophysical modeling of large-scale behavioral datasets.

Yrsa Roest is a research assistant working with Surya Gayet. She uses machine learning (artificial neural networks) to study the role of scene context on object recognition.

İlayda Cihangir is a research intern on an Erasmus exchange program, supervised by Surya Gayet. She contributes to the writing of a review/opinion paper about putative verbal contributions to visual working memory, and helps Kabir with EEG/eye-tracking data collection.

Burakcan Katar is a research intern supervised by Surya Gayet. He is currently writing a paper describing a pre-registered replication study (previously funded by an NWO replication grant, and conducted by Myrthel Dogge), where we investigated whether airthmetic equations can be solved without being consciously perceived.