Kamil Vlcek, MSc, PhD
Researcher
Cognitive Brain Research Group
Institute of Physiology, Czech Academy of Sciences
Scientific background
I work as an independent researcher in cognitive neuroscience at the Institute of Physiology of the CAS, focusing on memory, visual perception and spatial orientation. I am a principal investigator of several grant projects, a supervisor of PhD and Master students and a lecturer at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. I collaborate with several clinical departments and international experts from the UK, France and Denmark. My scientific results have been published in excellent scientific journals.
Research interests
My research focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of memory, spatial navigation, and visual perception. In a clinically oriented part of my research, in collaboration with neurologists and psychiatrists, we have documented impairments in spatial navigation and spatial perspective taking in MCI patients (Markova et al. 2015, Mokrisova et al. 2016) and also in patients with schizophrenia (Fajnerova et al. 2014), which can be used for early diagnosis and cognitive rehabilitation. In a more fundamental branch of my research, in collaboration with neurologists, engineers, and mathematicians, and using intracranial EEG, we studied the dynamics of information processing during the perception of simple or more complex visual scenes. First, we revealed a broad network for scene- and object-selective processing in both the ventral and dorsal visual streams of the human brain (Vlcek et al. 2020). Using novel connectivity analysis methods, we also documented the interaction between these two visual streams (Pidnebesna et al. 2023). In a follow-up study, using a more advanced experimental design focused on spatial reference frames, we described how egocentric and allocentric processing interact in the human brain, with egocentric starting earlier than allocentric (Moraresku et al. 2023). Finally, focusing on visual perspective taking, we distinguished the general and domain-specific brain processes in their temporal pattern, both inside and outside the higher visual system, and provided a novel example of hierarchical processing (Gunia et al. 2024).
Selected publications
Gunia,A., Moraresku,S., Janca,R., Jezdik,P., Kalina,A., Hammer,J., Marusic,P., and Vlcek,K. (2024). The brain dynamics of visuospatial perspective-taking captured by intracranial EEG. Neuroimage 285 (120487), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2023.120487