Dr J.M. Schoffelen (Jan Mathijs)
Associate Principal Investigator - Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour
Associate Principal Investigator - MR Techniques in brain function
Associate Principal Investigator - Representative Council DCCN
Kapittelweg 29
6525 EN NIJMEGEN
Postbus 9101
6500 HB NIJMEGEN
I study the interaction between brain regions (connectivity) based on the electrical activity that is generated by the brain, mainly using non-invasive recording techniques (MEG and EEG), in combination with advanced methods for connectivity estimation and source reconstruction. The type of neural interactions I am interested in relates to the different brain rhythms that can be observed from these recordings. The idea behind this is that brain regions that need to work together in order to perform a certain cognitive task, synchronize their rhythms in order to faciltate their communication. Compared to invasively obtained data, EEG and MEG data pose specific challenges to these types of analyses, due to the poor signal-to-noise ratio of the data and to the fact that reconstruction of the underlying neural sources is a necessary step to get a valid interpretation of the estimated connectivity. However, it is important to work on improved analysis methods for non-invasively obtained data, because the brain region interactions during cognitive processes in healthy humans can only be investigated using MEG and EEG. This is the more relevant in my current field of research, language.
Besides studying brain connectivity during language processing I am one of the main developers of the FieldTrip toolbox, that is used worldwide by neuroscientists to analyze their electrophysiological data.