Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Finland
fellow
Patrik Wikman
Home institution
University of Helsinki
Country of origin (home institution)
Finland
Discipline(s)
Psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis
Theme(s)
Behavior & Cognition
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Patrik Wikman graduated as a psychologist in 2012 and a PhD in 2019 at the University of Helsinki. Over his career he has worked at several Finnish (Aalto University, Tampere University, University of Turku) and international (Newcastle University, Georgetown University) universities. Since 2021, Wikman has served as a PI at the University of Helsinki. In 2023, he formed the Attentional Multimodal Networks research group, which studies how brain function changes across functional and cognitive contexts. The group uses neuroimaging methods combined with computational modeling, developing methods to integrate information from different neuroimaging datasets collected with experimental designs that approximate natural situations.
Research Project
Audiococktail: The Neural ingredients of cognitive sound representations
Our listening environment consists of many overlapping sound objects—that is, sounds that can be linked to a specific source, such as human speech, a passing car, or a singing bird. These moment-to-moment changing listening environments can be called soundscapes. Patrik Wikman’s research seeks to understand the neural mechanisms that allow such soundscapes to be parsed into components, enabling, for example, the tracking of speech in situations with many distracting background noises. He also investigates how our brains recognize, learn, and form new sound-object representations and categories. This work is important because it has recently been understood that certain sound-related syndromes are tied to either external (sound sensitivity) or internal (tinnitus) sound objects that fill the mind and challenge well-being.
Research Interests:
Auditory perception, attention, computational neuroscience
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