Dr Denise Moerel

Position

Researcher

Biography

Dr Denise Moerel completed her PhD in Cognitive Science from Macquarie University. She earned her BSc in psychology and MSc in cognitive neuroscience from Radboud University in the Netherlands. Her research uses methodologies such as EEG, MEG and fMRI in combination with machine learning methods. She joined MARCS as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in 2024.

Research Interests

My research investigates how social interactions shape our perception, and how attention facilitates these processes. The interactions that we have with other people can shape our interpretation of the world around us, as the groups we belong to can provide a shared context. To investigate how these shared representations develop, I use neural data in combination with machine learning techniques to explore the information in the brain. A part my work has focussed on how selective attention affects the processing of visual information in the brain, and how this information then guides behaviour. My research disentangled attention effects in the brain from other cognitive processes, such as visual short-term memory, decision-making, and temporal expectation. In my current projects, I use dual EEG (hyperscanning) to measure the brain activity from two people as they interact with each other. I use this method to investigate how we represent information about self and other during social interaction.

Qualifications

• PhD in cognitive science from Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
• MSc in cognitive neuroscience from Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
• BSc in psychology from Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Publications

For a listing of my publications, please see my Google Scholar page.

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