Main topics.
How the human brain encodes and decodes facial expression, how that shapes behaviour, and how reliably any of it can be measured. Four threads run through every project.
I
Face perception
How the brain extracts identity and diagnostic features from faces, and how those features attract the eye even when recognition is unaffected. ERP markers (N170, EPN, LPP) paired with eye-tracking fixation measures under brief and sustained viewing.
II
Emotion
How the brain reads emotional signals from facial features and from anticipated pain and expectation. Eye-tracking shows where attention lands, and a drift diffusion model captures how accumulating evidence under difficulty shapes behaviour and electrophysiology. Emotion recognition, anticipation, and affective processing.
III
Social cognition
Gaze direction as a social signal. Direct versus averted gaze in interactive paradigms (including Cyberball-style exclusion and overinclusion), and how those cues modulate early neural responses to rejection and acceptance. The P3 ERP component indexes the evaluation of social feedback, interpreted through the need-threat model of ostracism.
IV
Reproducibility & replicability
EEG and eye-tracking analyses have many defensible paths. Multi-analyst and many-labs projects (EEGManyPipelines, OHBM Brainhack, ARTEM-IS) quantify how much analytic variability shapes conclusions, and point toward preregistration, shared pipelines, and robust defaults. This extends to AI-assisted, transparent reporting in the methods section, part of my open-science work at Freie Universität Berlin.
Collaborations
Active collaborations with labs working on social cognition, developmental neuroscience, and methods reform in psychophysiology. Reach me via Scholar or LinkedIn.