I am a Royal Society Dorothy Research Hodgkin Fellow, a Fellowship that is awarded for early-career researchers to establish their independent line of research. Please contact me if you are interested in joining my group: yaara.erez@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk.

I am studying the neural correlates of cognitive control and adaptive goal-directed behaviour. In particular, I am investigating how we process information depending on a current context, or goal, while selecting information currently relevant to a task, and discarding irrelevant one. Another main research interest is hierarchical reasoning and control. The primary brain areas that I am interested in are a fronto-parietal network that is involved in attentional control, as well as occipito-temporal visual areas.
I am interested in linking brain and cognition at multiple scales and across species. With background in Computer Science and Psychology, I am using a variety of techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans, single-cell recordings from non-human primates, intracranial electrocorticography (ECoG) in epilepsy patients, computational modelling (mostly neural network simulations), and cognitive psychology methodologies.
My broader research aims are to understand the neural codes that underlie cognitive control and information processing in health and disease: how stages of processing are dynamically reflected in different types of neural signals, what happens to the neural system when it fails to appropriately process information, what factors influence these failures, and how we can improve the way we process information and solve reasoning problems.
Intraoperative testing project: one of my collaborative projects focuses on patients with brain tumours and functional mapping of executive function during surgeries. Some patients with low grade gliomas (LGG) undergo awake craniotomy to remove the tumour. During surgery, the patients perform a language-related task, and in conjunction with focal direct electrical stimulation this is used to functionally map the exposed brain tissue and the regions involved in language processing. This information is then used by the neurosurgeon to determine how much of the tissue to remove. In this project, we aim to expand this procedure to executive function and use additional techniques to improve the functional mapping process.