MSense Lab, LMU Munich

Principal Investigator

Zhuanghua Shi is the head of the Multisensory Perception Lab (MSense), a faculty member of General and Experimental Psychology at LMU, and an associated faculty member of the Graduate School of Systemic Neuroscience (GSN), at LMU. He is also associated with NuroImaging Core Unit Munich (NICUM). His research focuses on perceptual biases, contextual and probabilistic learning, and Bayesian interference.

Postdoctoral Researcher

Fredrik Allenmark. With a M.Sc. in Engineering Physics from Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, Fredrik explored the spatial resolutions of stereo and motion perception and their neural basis during his PhD in Newcastle University. Before joining the lab, Fredrik worked as a postdoc at the University Paris Descartes. Now he applies Bayesian modeling to investigate sequential effects, probability cueing effects, and distractor suppression mechanisms in visual search.

Siyi Chen joined the lab in late 2018, working on the crossmodal contextual learning project. In 2022, she won her independent research project from German Research Foundation (DFG), investigating uncertainty on context guidance and suppression mechanisms.

PhD Students

Jan Nasemann (MSc.) investigates how our attention is distributed across sensory modalities using crossmodal search paradigm and EEG techniques.

Lingyue Chen (MSc.) 
Time is illusive and can be distorted easily by various context. Lingyue is interested in mechanisms underlying time compression and time expansion, and whether both can be interpreted in a single unified framework.

Cemre Baykan (MSc.)
studied Psychology at Bogazici University in Turkey and University of Warwick in the UK . Then, she started her PhD in our lab in 2019, October. She is interested in understanding how contextual factors play a role on people’s time judgments. 

Yannan Su (MSc.) 
was fascinated by computational and cognitive neurosciences during her master’s study in the International Max Planck Research School for Neurosciences (Göttingen). As a doctoral candidate, she tries to tackle the contextual influence on color vision and time perception, especially focusing on underlying models and neural basis. In this tandem project, she is cosupervised by Zhuanghua Shi and Thomas Wachtler. 

Nan Qiu (MSc.)
studied psychology and cognitive science
at the School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China before coming to LMU. During her master’s study, she studied how selective visual attention modulates the allocation of cognitive resources and simultaneously prevents distraction by irrelevant information through using behavioral and EEG measures. Her research focuses on the probability cueing effect and related neural mechanisms and influences of volatility in probability learning.

Shao-Yang Tsai (MSc.)
received his MSc in the Institute of Cognitive neuroscience at National Central University in Taiwan. He devoted himself to the research of meditation and attention control while he was an MSc student. Now, he is working on the project “The construction of attentional templates in cross-modal pop-out search” to understand the mechanism of cross-modal perception better.

Hao Yu studied psychology at South China Normal University.  Being interested in Stimulus-Response Compatibility (SRC), her research is concerned with the question of whether the irrelevant response dimension could produce the interference effect and if so, what the differences are between the interference effects caused by the irrelevant stimulus and response dimensions. To better understand those questions, she plans to adopt multiple research approaches to investigate the underlying neural mechanisms of two interference effects.

Si Cheng
is interested in how our time perception is influenced by various contexts, particularly on the sequential dependence. She is also interested in cognitive and brain mechanisms underlying time perception.

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Jiao Wu (MSc.)

studied psychology at Peking University and joined the lab in 2021. She is interested in the organization of context-based prior formation in time perception.

Associated members

Artyom Zinchenko graduated from Max-Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Leipzig) in 2016. His PhD work explored the role of emotions in cognitive and affective control, using EEG and dynamic, multisensory environment. Artyom is now a postdoc working together with Prof. Thomas Geyer, PD Dr. Markus Conci and PD Dr. Zhuanghua Shi. He is interested in the role of affective information and environmental regularities in contextual cueing and its neural basis. To explore these questions, Artyom uses EEG, TMS, eye tracking, skin conductance, heart rate, and patient case-study research methods.  

Jimmy Esmaily

studied artificial intelligence and was a researcher at IPM in Iran. He started his Ph.D. in Munich in 2021 with Dr. Bahador Bahrami and Dr. Zhuanghua Shi. He is interested in social decision-making and learning with a focus on computational approaches.

Former doctoral students and postdocs

• Leonardo Assumpção
• Xiuna Zhu
• Bing Li
• Miloš Stanković
• Zhang, Bei
• Grzeczkowski, Łukasz 
• Yue, Ren
• Xuelian Zang (Hangzhou Normal University, China)
• Chen, Lihan (Peking University, China)
• Ganzenmüller, Stephanie
• Jia, Lina (Jiangnan University, China)
• Rank, Markus
• Zou, Heng

Former master students and research assistants

• Gizem Vural
• Selin Yılmaz
• Salma Elnagar
• Xiuhui Zhang
• Xinyue Wang
• Mengsi Deng
• Nawapohn Tongrod (Alynn)
• Schröder, Lena
• Urchs, Sebastian (M.Sc.)
• Wegner, Katharina
• Brooks, Kirsty
• Wenzel, Kerstin
• Wildberger, Jared