Jeroen J.A. van Boxtel started with a master's degrees in Biology (Utrecht University) and Cognitive Sciences (Université Pierre et Marie Curie & Collège de France, France), after which he completed his PhD at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, at the cross-disciplinary Helmholtz Institute in 2008. After obtaining his PhD, he moved to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he worked for two years on the relationship between attention and consciousness with Prof. Christof Koch. In 2010, he moved to the University of California, Los Angeles, to work on questions related to human action perception and attention, and the link to Autism Spectrum Disorders. In 2013, Jeroen van Boxtel was recruited to Monash University where he also headed the Cognitive Neuroimaging group at Monash Biomedical Imaging. He currently works at the School of Psychology at the University of Canberra, and focuses on the negative effects of attention, the link between attention and conscious perception,  the influence of attention on biological motion perception, and the influence of noise on visual processing.

My research involves cross disciplinary approaches. My lab uses experimental, computational and neuroimaging approaches. We look at various topics, mostly related to visual perception.

The relationship between attention and consciousness.

We do a lot of research on conscious visual perception, with a specific focus on the relationship to attention. Generally, attention will aid in conscious perception, but we are interested in those instances where more attention actually hurts conscious perception, and in some cases task performance. This research should help us understand how the brain produces conscious visual perceptions.

How perception of social stimuli depends links to autism spectrum traits.

Face or action stimuli convey a lot of social information. However, not everyone is equally attuned to these cues. In this project, we aim to investigate individual differences in the sensitivity to social stimuli, and look at whether they correlate with individual autism traits.

Noisy brains? Measuring individual variability, and improve perception.

Humans are generally very good at perceiving visual stimuli. Adding noise generally makes this perception worse. However, there are cases where adding noise helps. We want to find out whether we can use this phenomenon to make people (with or without vision problems) see better. We are also interested in whether some people just have more noisy brains, and whether this is related to attention, and perception.