Matthias Nau is a cognitive neuroscientist at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience in Trondheim, Norway. He finished his PhD recently in Christian Doeller's group at the Kavli, where he currently works as a postdoc. Whenever the current pandemic cools down, Matthias will start a position as a postdoc at NIH with Chris Baker (this position was supposed to start in early 2020).
In this conversation, we talk about a variety of topics, from Matthias's recent research (the link between vision and high-level spatial coding principles in the brain (e.g. grid cells), the development of cognitive maps in humans, and a novel form of using fMRI for eye-tracking he co-developed with Markus Frey), to the relationship between electrophysiology studies in animals and fMRI studies in humans, education in neuroscience, and science communication.
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Papers mentioned:
Killian, N. J., Jutras, M. J., & Buffalo, E. A. (2012). A map of visual space in the primate entorhinal cortex. Nature.
Nau, M., Schröder, T. N., Bellmund, J. L., & Doeller, C. F. (2018). Hexadirectional coding of visual space in human entorhinal cortex. Nature neuroscience.
Nau, M., Julian, J. B., & Doeller, C. F. (2018). How the brain’s navigation system shapes our visual experience. Trends in cognitive sciences.
Wills, T. J., Cacucci, F., Burgess, N., & O'Keefe, J. (2010). Development of the hippocampal cognitive map in preweanling rats. Science.