Despite the wealth of information available to us at any one time, we are able to navigate through these sensory-laden environments in a purposeful way. How do our brains select what is relevant to our current goal, direct our behaviour accordingly, and then update this once the goal changes? Using fMRI and MEG-fMRI fusion, I study how the representation of task information is affected by the manner in which we direct our attention (e.g., towards a location, and/or to a feature) in a core frontoparietal network ("multiple-demand" (MD) regions), and how these representations affect that of domain-specific regions to give rise to goal-directed behaviour. I am also interested in the link between the MD system and fluid intelligence, and whether (and how) cognitive processes affected by non-MD damage might nonetheless be supported by this system.

My work is supervised by Alex Woolgar (Cambridge) and Romy Lorenz (Cambridge; MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig; Stanford) and funded by the Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholars Programme.