In the big picture, my interests revolve around the role of motivation in visual perception and the manner in which systems known to be involved in emotion and motivation modulate visual perception by way of attention, expectation and mechanisms of plasticity.

For my thesis project I'm studying electrophysiological responses to social stimuli from the human brain. I'm interested in how specific brain structures such as the amygdala function in perceiving and orienting to faces and in modulating activty in other brain areas such as cortical face processing systems. Questions about the organization of these systems can be addressed in detail with intracranial recordings. Such recordings are obtained with the generous help of surgical epilepsy patients during clinical monitoring.