During my Ph.D., co-advised by Rafael Malach (Weizmann Institute) and Leon Deouell (ELSC), I studied how eye movements and eye blinks modulate visual representations in the human cortex. In my work, I combined intracranial recordings from patients undergoing epilepsy surgery, eye-tracking, fMRI, and statistical modeling. I found that whereas the early visual cortex represents oculomotor disruptions to vision in the same fashion as external disruptions, higher-order visual regions selectively inhibit eye-blink- and saccade-related visual activations, resulting in a robust neural population code.
After completing my Ph.D. at ELSC, I moved to New York for a postdoc at Columbia University, where I was advised by Nikolaus Kriegeskorte. With his guidance, I developed “controversial stimuli”, a method for comparing neural network models of human perception by testing humans with inputs synthesized to cause disagreement among alternative neural network models.