Tom Marshall

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab.

My primary research interest is the brain systems responsible for allocating visual attention. The visual world is a busy place and the brain’s limited resources have to be sensibly allocated. This requires mechanisms both for allocating attention to the appropriate stimuli, and for learning which stimuli have previously been relevant.

As a PhD student I focused on the role of the dorsal attentional network in driving visual cortex into the optimal state to process incoming task-relevant information and inhibit distraction. As a post-doc I am investigating whether this network can be functionally decomposed into nodes performing different computations at different intrinsic timescales.

My work has a strongly multimodal focus, quantifying rapidly-evolving brain dynamics with MEG, structural connectivity with diffusion MRI, probing and manipulating brain states with transcranial stimulation (TMS, tDCS), and lately, relating these to computation via biophysical models.