CSHC - Center for the Study of Human Cognition

Professor of cognitive psychology
Part time position (15%) as a researcher at the Department of Neuropsychology, Ullevål University Hospital

Main research interests
How does the brain develop and change during the life-span, and which cognitive consequences does this development have? My research is focused on understanding the dynamic relationship between changes in brain structure, brain function, and cognitive abilities. Participants in these studies range from 7 to 90 years of age.

I am professor in cognitive neuropsychology with the department of psychology, University of Oslo (Norway) and adjunct professor with the Institute of Biological and Medical Psychology, University of Bergen, Norway. I received my B.A. in experimental psychology in 1987 from Universitá La Sapienza (Rome, Italy) and my Ph.D. in biological psychology in 1993 from The University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA). My former research and teaching career includes the University of Tromsø (Norway), University of Guelph (Canada), and Harvard University (USA). I have also been a Clinical Research Fellow, at Harvard Medical School, Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

Professor of clinical neuropsychology

I am a clinical neuropsychologist with a strong interest in integration of neuropsychology with neuroscience. My basic training was at the University of Oslo, and my dr.philos. work in 1984 was on aphasia, based on 10 years of clinical research with stroke patients. I have held clinical positions at Sunnaas Rehabilitation hospital and at Rikshospitalet University hospital, from 1983 I had an adjunct academic position at the Department of Psychology and in 1993 I became full professor.  My current main interests are in aging and dementia, and in the influence of genetic variation on individual differences. Also I have been involved in a broad range of clinical studies of neurological patients groups (head injury, epilepsy, stroke).

Professor of Neuropsychology

I am a trained clinical neuropsychologist, with special focus on test development and the assessment of cognition in neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. I did my cand.psychol. and dr.philos. degrees at the University of Oslo, served as full time neuropsychologist at Sunnaas Rehabilitation Hospital and Rikshospitalet University Hospital, as assistant professor in neuro¬psychology at the universities of Oslo and Tromsø, and since 2003 as full time professor at the Institute of  Psychology, University of Oslo, together with part time practice as specialist in clinical neuro¬psy¬chology. As head of the neurocognitive unit of the Thematic Organized Psychosis (TOP) research group at the Medical Department, University of Oslo, I supervise studies on neurocognition in schizophrenia and bipolar disorders.

Professor of cognitive neuropsychology
Part time position (15%) as a researcher at the Department of Neuropsychology, Ullevål University Hospital

Main research interests
My current research is targeted at understanding the mechanisms underlying different types of change in brain and cognition, and whether, and how, we ourselves can initiate, enhance or slow them. Throughout life, our mental capacities and brains are under continuous alteration: Some changes are part of positive development, others are debilitating.

Professor

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Fax: (+47) 22 84 50 51
Telephone: (+47) 22 84 51 46

Main research projects
My main research interests are cognitive/experimental and clinical neuropsychology. I have ongoing projects on neuropsychological impairments and brain function in mood and impulsivity disorders. A main issue is to link neuropsychology and  genetics, neurotransmittors and brain imaging. Another main topic is to identify cognitive vulnerability markers for mood and impulsivity disorders in healthy people. I am also involved in projects related to neuropsychological aspects of chronic pain and white matter CNS diseases as well as neurobehavioral consequences of fetal alcohol exposure.

Professor of Cognitive Psychology

Areas of interest/ projects:
Ongoing empirical projects focus on basic mechanisms of visual information processing, attention and memory, and the applied aspects of cognition studied in the context of eyewitness testimony; many of these are large-scale collaborative projects with laboratories and research groups at the University of Freiburg and the University of Regensburg (Germany), the University of California at Los Angeles and Davis, and University of Padua, Italy.

Professor of Cognitive Psychology

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Fax: (+47) 22 84 50 01
Telephone: (+47) 22 84 51 26

I am a cognitive psychologist, with a particular interest in memory. I did my first degree at the University of Exeter, and my PhD at the University of Nottingham. Since then I have worked at Université Pierre Mendès France and the Hôpital Michallon (Grenoble), Université de Savoie (Chambéry), and the University of Tromsø. I was made full professor at the University of Oslo in 2003. In addition to lab-based research on basic cognitive functions, I try to apply experimental cognitive methods in unconventional settings, where, I believe, there is a lot of unrealised potential.

Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology

I am a cognitive psychologist with a growing interest for the relationship between models of cognitive functioning and the brain. I have a background from Human Factors research related to advanced control room settings and finished my PhD on cognitive aspects of metaphor reasoning at the University of Oslo.

My main research interest is in the relationship between low and high level cognitive mechanisms, general human memory both in everyday settings and in the laboratory, the relationship between emotion and cognition.

Post Doctoral Fellow at the Institute of Psychology, University of Oslo, and Neuroimaging Research Fellowship at the Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine.

Areas of interest: 

• The functions and purpose of the neurotransmitters serotonin (5-HT) and norepinephrine.
• Brain imaging techniques such as PET and fMRI.
• Sex differences in response to serotonergic depletion.
• Sex differences in the prevalence of depression, anxiety, addiction, AD/HD and impulse control disorders.
• Impulsivity (behaviour and strategy on neuropsychological tests).
• Drug addiction, PTSD, transcultural research and developmental issues.

I am a post doc at the department of Psychology at the University of Oslo. Before coming to Oslo I completed my PhD at the Max Planck Institue for Human Development in Berlin, and was a post doc at the same institute and later at the Freie Universität Berlin.

My main research interests are mechanistic models of decision making and learning. That is, I work on simple mathematical models that describe peoples behavior and the underlying cognitive and brain mechanisms as observed with fMRI and EEG. Most of the time I apply such models to describe decision making in the context of social learning and value based decisions.

I am also interested in fMRI methods, in particular in developping new methods for fMRI meta analysis and efficient denoising of fMRI data.

Post-doctoral research fellow

The main topics of my current research are brain maturation and cognitive development in childhood and adolescence, and the role of specific genes for these processes. I am particularly interested in the development of different aspects of cognitive control, such as performance monitoring, inhibition, shifting and working memory updating and how these changes are related to gray and white matter properties of the brain as measured by structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). Another central interest is the combination and integration of different neuroscientific methods, including electrophysiology, MRI and DTI.

Research Fellow, PhD

I’m a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for the Study of Human Cognition (CSHC) and principal investigator of the project Structural and functional connectivity in the aging brain: cognitive consequences and genetic modifiers funded by the Research Council of Norway. In addition to colleagues at CSHC, I collaborate closely with brilliant researchers at Oxford Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain (FMRIB), University of Oxford, Multimodal Imaging Laboratory (MMIL), University of California San Diego, and Oslo University Hospital (OUS).

Our research team at CSHC utilises various structural and functional neuroimaging techniques (structural/functional magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI/fMRI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), electroencephalography (EEG), event-related potentials (ERP)) in studies of brain/behaviour interactions in a developmental and aging perspective.

My main focus is aimed at characterizing the dynamic relations between cerebral structural/functional and cognitive alterations accompanying normal child development and aging, but also the interruptions of this dynamics in pathological conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, with a particular emphasis on structural and functional brain connectivity as measured by DTI and resting-state fMRI. Large efforts are also aimed at understanding the genetic contribution to individual differences in cerebral structure, function and cognition, and further what role this genotypic variation play in modulating individual differences in developmental processes and in manifestations of pathological neurodegenerative phenotypes/conditions.

I am involved in a number of national and international research projects, with a common focus on combining neuroimaging, cognitive, genetic and clinical data in order to further our understanding of various clinical disorders as well as normal developmental and aging processes, e.g. Pediatric, Imaging, Neurocognition, and Genetics (PING).

Students interested in pursuing a cand psychol or MA thesis within any of these areas of research are encouraged to contact me.

Research Fellow

A cognitive neuroscientist by training, my research interests span the fields of social, cognitive and affective neuroscience. "Pain, pleasure and relief," the title of my doctoral thesis (University of Oxford, 2008), describes a main theme in my research. Namely, the description of the neural processes which underpin hedonic (subjective) sensations. 

To understand the relationship between physiology (signalling in the peripheral and central nervous system) and the subjective experience of touch, pain, taste etc., my research employs a variety of techniques, including:

• fMRI 
• Eye tracking/pupillometry
• Pharmacological challenges (oxytocin, opioid agonists/antagonists)

PhD Research Fellow

I am working in a research group headed by Prof. Anders M. Fjell and Prof. Kristine B. Walhovd. We strive to understand the relationship between alterations in the brains structural make-up and its functional manifestations in normal development and aging, as well as following discontinuity in the normal development trajectories due to for instance disease. To this end, we use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), including diffusion tensor imaging, electroencephalography/event-related potentials, and various cognitive-behavioural tasks. Our current and planned research projects also include genetic data in order to investigate the influence of genetic variance on the structure-function relationships in the brain.

PhD Research Fellow in Cognitive Neuroscience

Supervisors: Kristine Walhovd and Anders Fjell

Academic interests

• Lifespan changes in cognition
• Neurobiological substrates of memory and executive functions
• Behavioural and neural mechanisms of error-correction learning 
• Associative learning theory
• Quantitative research methods

PhD student

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Telephone: (+47) 22845204 

I graduated with a Master of Philosophy in Psychology in 2006 from the University of Oslo. Since 2007  I  have been a Ph.D student at the Department of Psychology, University of Oslo. In my research I focus on memory processes after trauma exposure. My PhD project is entitled  .” Memory processes in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: General impairments, negative biases, and trauma-specific components”, my supervisor is Professor Tim Brennen. 

M.D./Ph.D.-student

I´m currently pursuing my Ph.D. degree with funding from the Kavli Research Center for Ageing and Dementia. My project focuses on investigating short-term effects of systematic memory training on aging brain structure and cognition.

The project is lead by my supervisors, Professors Anders M. Fjell and Kristine B. Walhovd. During my time as a student research fellow (2007-2010) I´ve had particular interest in applying the FSL and FreeSurfer software packages in the study of longitudinal brain structure changes in middle-aged and older adults. Also, I´ve developed systematic 8-week memory training program for both healthy and mildly cognitively impaired individuals. For more details, see my publication list. 

Psychologist and PhD-student

I am accredited psychologist with a degree in clinical psychology from University of Oslo (cand. psychol) and a BA in psychology from COGS at University of Sussex (Brighton, UK). My areas of main interest today are: Clinical neuropsychology, cognitive rehabilitation/remediation/training, brain connectivity and plasticity, and rehabilitation psychology.

PhD Student

In spring 2010, I received a M.Phil degree in Psychology from the University of Oslo. My area of focus was Cognitive Neuroscience. Since February 2011, I have started working on my PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Department of Psychology, University of Oslo.

My main fields of interest include:

• face perception
• object recognition
• stereo vision
• eye-tracking

PhD student

I am working in a research group led by Professor Svein Magnussen, and Associate Professor Tor Endestad. Our main tool of investigation is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and inspired by the psychophysical research tradition (and unlike most fMRI studies), we prioritize experimental control over large samples of participants. This gives us the opportunity to investigate not only which brain areas that are active during a given cognitive or perceptual task, but also how computations are performed within and between the individual areas. 

Psychologist and PhD-student
I am accredited psychologist with a degree in clinical psychology  from University of Oslo (cand. psychol).
My PhD-thesis is entitled: “Neuropsychological functions in Unipolar Major Depression with and without co-morbid anxiety disorders”.
The main topics of my current research are: clinical and experimental neuropsychology, mood disorders; depression, anxiety, co-morbidity, and their assosiation with executive functions and different  attention and memory functions.
Supervisor: Professor Nils-Inge Landrø (Department of Psychology, UiO)

PhD student

I am a psychologist studying for a PhD, with a project about cognitive and brain development during childhood and adolescence (8-19 years). Ca 100 children and adolescents are undergoing MRI scanning, cognitive/neuropsychological testing, and electrophysiological measurements while doing cognitive tasks (ERP). The MRI scans acquired are both structural, morphometric scans, and DTI scans.

Phd student

My PhD project investigates the role of the cerebellum in cognition, and I approach this question by studying the cognitive effects of focal cerebellar lesions. Importantly, lesion studies might allow firmer conclusions to be drawn with regard to the necessity of a brain structure than many other methods, such as neuroimaging studies of healthy participants. That is, the systematic study of patients with focal brain lesions provide a powerful method for identifying the brain areas critical for a given cognitive function and – conversely – the cognitive functions selectively impaired by a lesion to a given brain area. In my PhD-project, I primarily focus on basic attentional mechanisms, such as sensory prediction, expectancy and priming and use a range of different methods, such as clinical neuropsychological testing, experimental cognitive psychology and measurements of brain structure (MRI & DTI) and function (fMRI & EEG).