Treue, Stefan, Prof. Dr.

Professor, Director of the German Primate Center
Head of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory

1992: Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1992-1993: Postdoctoral Fellow, MIT
1993-1995: Postdoctoral Fellow, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas
1995-2001: Work Group Leader, Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Tübingen
2000-2001: Professor of Animal Physiology, University of Tübingen
2001: Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Biological Psychology

Major Research Interests
Research at the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory is aimed at understanding the neural basis of visual perception. Vision is an active process that is far more than a passive registration of our environment. Rather, on its way from the eyes to and through the cortex, visual information is modulated by numerous processes that enhance some aspects while diminishing others. One of these processes is attention, i.e. the ability to filter out unwanted information and concentrate the brain´s processing abilities on relevant information.

The accurate representation of visual motion in the environment is one of the most important tasks of the visual system. Correspondingly, research in the laboratory concentrates on this ability as a model for sensory information processing in general.

We use various techniques. While our emphasis is on electrophysiology, i.e. the recording of the activity of neurons in the visual cortex of macaque monkeys and measuring human perceptual abilities with psychophysical methods, we also use theoretical approaches and functional brain imaging.
Using these techniques, we have been able to elucidate how motion information is represented in primate cortical area MT and how attention changes that representation and correspondingly the percept of the visual environment.

Homepage Department/Research Group:
https://www.dpz.eu/en/cognitive-neuroscience-unit

ORCID: 0009-0001-8938-5810