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New face at MIB: Manon Grube

Assistant Professor Dr. Manon Grube studies behavioural measures, neural bases and functional relevance of duration- and beat-based timing mechanisms in the healthy and disordered human brain.

09.08.2018 | Hella Kastbjerg

Being fascinated when learning about neural firing patterns as the basis for our perceiving the world around us, led Manon to study biology and specialise in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Universities of Göttingen, Santa Cruz, California, and Leipzig, Germany. She developed a keen interest in auditory processing, allowing music and speech to “happen” in our brains. As a postdoc at Newcastle, including a visiting stay at BRAMS, Manon became most intrigued with time and rhythm processing, and developed her own line of research in perceptual timing, which she has been continuing and expanding as an IPODI fellow at TU Berlin and now at MIB.  

Rooted in a strong behavioural foundation of a dozen years of experience in psychoacoustics, the main aims of her research are: i. to define mechanisms of timing, specifically duration- and beat-based; ii. to identify their neural correlates, ie. the differential contributions of the components of the brain’s timing system, specifically cerebellum, basal ganglia, and temporal, parietal and frontal cortex; and iii. to demonstrate their functional relevance to music, language and movement.

In her research, Manon combines cross-lingual behavioural work in large cohorts of children, healthy adults and neurological patient populations with multimodal neuroimaging (EEG, MRI, and soon MEG), neurostimulation, and machine-learning based modelling techniques into one coherent line of research. Her work has continuously yielded significant advances in the field, in particular in dissociating duration- and beat-based timing and the role for rhythmic sequence processing in language skill. Her foci in her current work at MIB are on i. the duration of the felt present; ii. the neural correlates of the feeling of the “beat”, and predictive timing; iii. the effects of plasticity and expertise. Her main long-term direction is toward the development of EEG- and rhythm-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), coming neurofeedback and behavioural training to mitigate neurological and developmental timing disorders.

Navnenyt, Forskning, Alle grupper, Musicinthebrain, Musicinthebrain, Forskning