In 2008, I graduated from the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Master at the University of Amsterdam . I did my internship in 2007 at the University of Cambridge Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute. Here I investigated the cognitive effects of antipsychotics and Methylphenidate (Ritalin) in Schizophrenic and ADHD patients respectively, using both fMRI and PET. During my Masters I worked as research TMS assistant at ACACIA ( Amsterdam Center for the study of Adaptive Control in Brain and Behavior). My master thesis was in collaboration with prof. dr. KR Ridderinkhof and dr. WMP van den Wildenberg, on the role of emotion in action readiness using motor-TMS.

Research Interest

Currently I am a PhD student working with prof. dr. VAF Lamme and dr HS Scholte. The goal of the PhD project is to get a better understanding of the mechanisms in the brain that make us see something conscious or not. It might be that the things we do not see are registered by our brain unconsciously and thereby influencing our behavior. It is becoming increasingly accepted that reentrant processing in the visual cortex plays acrucial role in perceptual organization and visual awareness. It is howeverunclear what the fundamentaldifferences are between reentrant and feedforward processing. Therefore, we investigate the contribution of specific neurotransmitters to these types of processing, and study the effects of pharmacological interventions on conscious visual perception. We manipulate consciousness using different paradigms including masking and try to find out to what extend the brain still registered the stimulus, brain activity will be recorded using different techniques such as EEG and fMRI.

Publications
Meuwese, J.D.I., Van Loon, A.M., Scholte, H.S., Vulink, N.C.C., Lirk, P.B., Hollmann, M.W., & Lamme, V.A.F. (2013) NMDA receptor antagonist ketamine impairs feature integration in visual perception, PLoS ONE, 8, e79326. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0079326.

Van Loon, A.M., Knapen, T., Scholte, H.S., St. John-Saaltink, E., Donner, T.H., & Lamme, V.A.F. (2013). GABA shapes the dynamics of bistable perception, Current Biology, 23, 823-827.

Gerlicher, A.M.V., Van Loon, A.M., Scholte, H.S., Lamme, V.A.F.,  & van der Leij, A.R.  (2013). Emotional facial expressions reduce neural adaptation, Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience, doi: 10.1093/scan/nst022.

Van Loon, A.M., Scholte, H.S., Van Gaal, S., van der Hoort, B.J.J., & Lamme, V.A.F.  (2012). GABA_A Agonist Reduces Visual Awareness: A Masking–EEG Experiment, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 4, 965-974.

Van Loon, A.M., Van den Wildenberg, W.P.M., Van Stegeren, A.H., Hajcak, G., & Ridderinkhof, K.R. (2010). Emotional stimuli modulate readiness for action: A transcranial magnetic stimulation study. Cognitive Affective Behavioral Neuroscience, 10, 174-181.

Dodds, C.M., Müller, U., Clark, L., Van Loon, A., Cools, R., & Robbins, T.W. (2008). Methylphenidate has differential effects on BOLD signal related to cognitive subprocesses of reversal learning. Journal of Neuroscience, 28, 5976-5982.

• LookingWithoutSeeing

• Cognitive Neuroscience Group

• ACACIA lab

No known ancillary activities