Nico Broers

Curriculum Vitae (CV)

Research Focus

• What makes a picture memorable? What are the neural signatures of image memorability and which image features are particularly relevant?
  I am a PhD student working in Niko Busch's lab in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Muenster. I am also affiliated with the research school at the Otto-Creutzfeld Center of Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience. Before coming to Muenster, I worked with Marieke van Vugt in the Cognitive Modeling Group and Simone Sprenger in the Neurolinguistics department, both situated at the University of Groningen, NL. Before that I was a visiting research student at MIT in Molly Potter's lab. I did my Master of Science in Cognitive Neuroscience in 2015 at the BCN research school in Groningen, supervised by Mark Nieuwenstein and Molly Potter. I study the astonishing efficiency and power of our visual system. Indeed, people can remember thousands of pictures that they have seen only once (Standing, 1973). Recently however, researchers have shown that scenes vary dramatically in the likelihood that they will be remembered: some pictures are consistently remembered, others are consistently forgotten, irrespective of the observer (Bainbridge, Isola, and Oliva, 2013; Isola, Xiao, Parikh, Torralba, and Oliva, 2014). What makes a picture memorable? What are the neural signatures of image memorability and which image features are particularly relevant? I investigate these questions with neuroscientific methods (Eye-Tracking, EEG), machine vision and behavioral experiments.

Publications

Doctorates