Thesis defense Maryam Mostafalu “Tracking the spotlight of attention in different contexts using MEG”

I am pleased to invite you to my thesis defense entitled “Tracking the spotlight of attention in different contexts using MEG”, which will take place on Friday, December 19th at 14:00, in the Amphitheatre of the Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod (ISC-MJ). 

The defense will be in English. I would be very happy to have you join me for this important moment. 

You are also invited to the buffet afterward, whether or not you are able to attend the defense itself. 

You can find the summary of my PhD thesis here: 

"This thesis investigates how spatial attention is encoded in the human brain, how it fluctuates rhythmically, and how it flexibly adapts to different cognitive contexts. Using MEG decoding, behavioral measures, and multivariate analyses, we show that covert attention can be tracked from brain activity with millisecond precision, that its neural signatures exhibit rhythmic sampling in the alpha band, and that the precision of attentional coding depends on cue reliability and predicts behavioral performance. It further compares time- and frequency-domain analyses and demonstrates that they capture largely overlapping information about attentional states while offering complementary interpretability. Finally, it reveals that task context reshapes the neural geometry of attention, with distinct but interacting subspaces encoding spatial focus and cognitive rules."