My main research interest lies with elucidating how the human brain supports ‘cognitive control’, the ability to generate, maintain, and adjust sets of processing strategies (task-sets) in the pursuit of an internal goal. How does an internal goal shape the way we process information? Our general research strategy for answering this question is to fractionate the multifarious concept of cognitive control into experimentally tractable component processes (for example, identifying particular mechanisms for shielding a current task-set from interference by task-irrelevant stimulus information), and to harness behavioral, neuroimaging, and neuro-disruptive techniques to probe their neural underpinnings and interrelations. In practice, this work typically deals with exploring how regions of the frontal and parietal lobes orchestrate mnemonic and attentive processes, and bias sensory and motor activity in line with current goals.
