TÜBİTAK 1001 Projects
fMRI study: Rethinking How Control is Instantiated by Fronto-Parietal Regions
The critical importance of fronto-parietal cortices for our ability to control and organize our thoughts and behavior (i.e. cognitive control) has been well recognized, but how these regions do so, remains unknown. It used to be thought that different subsets of regions within these cortices instantiate different kinds of control processes (or executive functions) like attention, working memory, inhibition, conflict monitoring etc. However, these different subsets could never be characterized. Instead, the same set of fronto-parietal regions, called Multiple Demand (MD) regions, is found active whenever any task, involving any control process, is executed. A key question therefore is: what do MD regions do?
fMRI study: Deprived Sensory Cortices and Cognitive Control
Are functions of various brain regions fixed? How much can they change? Does the structure of a
region determine its function? Is it the structure or the input that determines a region’s function or
neither? To gain insights into these questions, people have studied the fate of sensory cortices
deprived of their usual inputs – the ‘visual’ cortex in the blind and the ‘auditory’ cortex in the deaf.
We will study how deprived sensory cortices adapt and take on different functions and how this process relates to cognitive control and other cognitive modalities.
Other Projects
Working memory & goal direction
In this line of work, we are investigating working memory and it’s relation to goal directed storage of items, via online experiments using an n-back task and a picture witholding task and a line rotation memorization task.
Time perception
We are investigating time perception and the representation of time under the modulation of task difficulty in an controlled experiment.
TÜBİTAK 1002 Project: Investigating the Impact of Forgetting in Software Development
In collaboration with Asst. Prof Eray Tüzün from the Computer Science department, we are investigating the impact of exposure to code on coding performance and forgetting, via a controlled experiment setting.