I am interested in behavioral neurology and the neurobiological substrates of cognitive processes. The major topics on which I am working concern visual perception and attention, particularly in relation to unilateral spatial neglect and parietal lobe disorders; but also face and object recognition, emotional processing, and disorders of the body schema, such as anosognosia and hysterical conversion. I am most excited about projects that combine behavioral observations (in neurological patients or healthy people) with neurophysiological measures such as fMRI and evoked potentials.

A common goal in the research on attention and emotion is to understand how different brain areas that are each specialized to process a distinct kind of information can interact with and influence processing in other interconnected areas. Unilateral spatial neglect after parietal (and other) lesions suggests that activity in parietal cortex may influence perceptual processing and afford conscious representation of sensory inputs. Likewise, processing of emotional signals in limbic brain regions (such as amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex) can influence a variety of perceptual, attentional, and mnesic processes (for example, through re-entrant modulatory feedback).

As a neurologist, I am also involved in the clinical assessment of patients with brain diseases who are admitted in the Neurology Clinic at Geneva Hospital, especially when they present with neuropsychological disorders. Other activities include teaching for students, at the Medical School, as well as at the Psychology School. A future and exciting opportunity concerns the creation of a new program in neurosciences in Geneva that will promote multidisciplinary approaches to the study of brain functions and dysfunctions.