Postgraduate research students

Within the daily experience of our lives, a significant amount of our behaviour remains visually-driven. We use visual landmarks to guide our navigational strategies, we rely on visual cues to find our friend in a crowd of passers-by and even when communicating our thoughts, many of the descriptors we use are of visual character. However, while the sensory input we receive within the modality might at first appear consistent across our visual experience, the distributional characteristics of visual features across space are far from uniform.

I am interested in the relationship between coarse-scale organisational principles of visually-driven areas in the human brain (e.g. visual cortex, superior colliculus) and the distributional characteristics of the visual environment (e.g. orientation, spatial frequency content). My work focuses on the use of computational modelling and high-field fMRI (7T) to explore:

1. How sensitivity to e.g. orientation of a stimulus could be captured at the level of a single voxel and whether these sensitivities are systematically organised across the visual cortex
2. How the presence of visual anisotropies (e.g. differences in receptive field size across upper and lower visual fields) is preserved across the visual system hierarchy, progressing from superior colliculus to higher-order visual areas

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• Dr Alessio Fracasso
• Professor Lars Muckli

Oral presentations

2022 Characterising coarse-scale orientation biases in human visual cortex via forward-modelling approach; Moravkova K., Fabius J.H., Fracasso A.; Organization for Human Brain Mapping

Posters

2022 Opposing trend in population receptive field size across upper and lower visual fields in the superior colliculus and early visual cortex; Moravkova K. & Fracasso A.; Society for Neuroscience

2022 Characterising coarse-scale orientation biases in human visual cortex via forward-modelling approach; Moravkova K., Fabius J.H., Fracasso A; ENCODS

2021 Biased distribution of fitted parameters in space reveals robust, yet spurious, angular tuning maps in the early visual cortex; Moravkova K., Fabius J.H., Fracasso A.; Society for Neuroscience

2021 Biased distribution of fitted parameters in space leads to angular tuning maps in the visual cortex; Moravkova K., Fabius J.H., Fracasso A.; Organization for Human Brain Mapping

2020 Modelling population receptive fields as Gabor filters in the human visual cortex; Moravkova K., Fabius J.H., Fracasso A.; Synapsium Donders

• Graduate Teaching Assistant, Psychology [BSc/MA/MA(SocSci)]
• Graduate Teaching Assistant, Psychological Studies (conversion) [MSc]
• Graduate Teaching Assistant, Biology (Level 1/2)/Human Biological Sciences/Neuroscience [BSc/MSci]
• Graduate Teaching Assistant, Global Mental Health [MSc]
• Tutor, Psychology Summer School