I recently obtained my PhD at the University of Amsterdam. On this site you can find information about me and the project. Below is a short description of the project and a biography:

Phenomenal and Access Awareness

Using psychophysical experiments one can differentiate between two stages of conscious visual perception. The early stage is characterised by bare 'phenomenal' awareness. A later stage, mediated by attention, is characterised by access awareness, meaning the ability report about a stimulus. Using a combination of psychophysical methods, EEG and functional MRI it is attempted to determine on which cortical areas of the brain these two stages depend. In particular, the hypotheses will be tested that (1) phenomenal experience is caused by recurrent interactions between early and late visual areas, while (2) access awareness requires activation of so-called executive areas in the frontal cortex.

Biography

Johannes Fahrenfort obtained his M.Sc. in psychology at the University of Amsterdam in 1999. His Masters research project concerned the ability of normal subjects to exhibit behaviour akin to blindsight, which is the ability of some people with damage to their primary visual cortex to guess right about certain features of objects in the blind part of their visual field. After graduation he went on to the University of Eindhoven, where he obtained a professional doctorate in engineering in the field of human computer interaction. As part of his final project he worked at Trilogy in Austin, Texas, a software company delivering software solutions to Fortune 500 companies. Upon return to the Netherlands he obtained a PhD in the Cognitive Neuroscience Group of Prof.Dr. V.A.F. Lamme, where he now researches visual perception and visual awareness using modern imaging techniques.