Dr. Radoslaw Cichy is a Professor of Neurocognitive and Experimental Psychology and Managing Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Freie Universität Berlin (Free University of Berlin).
Radoslaw Cichy is a cognitive and computational neuroscientist who studies how the brain allows us to perceive and recognize objects and scenes. He has developed innovative new computational approaches that combine the strengths of different ways of measuring brain function in humans (EEG; MEG; fMRI), while at the same time relating brain function to the ground truth of perceptual experience. His contributions include the development of M/EEG-fMRI “fusion” (2014, 2020). The central idea behind fusion is that even though different types of neural signals capture different aspects of the neural response (MEG or EEG are better at capturing changes over time, while fMRI is relatively slow, but has more spatial precision), it is nevertheless possible to mathematically exploit the similarities in how each type of signal responds to different experimental conditions to extract a composite picture of how visual signals are processed by different brain regions over time. Prof. Cichy has applied fusion to models of the neural representation of objects throughout the processing. In other work using deep neural network models, Cichy and colleagues (2019) showed that the evolution of neural signals in different brain regions over time reflected the role of both bottom-up and top-down (recurrent) processing. has published over 40 articles. Cichy’s work is supported by a German Emmy Noether award (1.2 Mill Euro) and an ERC Starting Grant (1.5 Mill Euro). He is also co-founder of the Argonauts Project, an “open challenge” to investigators to propose and test computational models of the brain’s response to objects. The Argonauts Project also is a novel and engaging approach to open science, where researchers share data and findings with each other and with the public.
