Our lab does research at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience, computational neuroscience and cognitive psychology.
Using a multimodal approach including neuroimaging (EEG, MEG, TMS, fMRI), computational modeling and behavioral measures, we investigate the link between the spatio-temporal organization of brain oscillations and visual perception and attention. We use vision as a tool to study cognition in the human brain.
Here we highlight several of our research projects:
ERC Consolidator grant project SAMPLING
A computational theory of rhythmic attentional sampling functions
For every action, we see, hear, touch, smell and taste our surroundings. Our senses constantly receive a seemingly unmanageable flow of sensory signals. Attention is the mental function that selects relevant sensory information and ameliorate their processing by the brain to efficiently guide our actions.
The recent years witnessed a paradigm shift in the field of attention research. Opposite to our impression that one can deploy attention continuously over short time periods, attention in fact processes perceptual information rhythmically. This rhythmic attentional sampling leads to phases of improved perceptual performance alternating with phases of diminished performance (see our reviews: Dugué and VanRullen, 2017; Keitel et al., 2022; Kienitz et al., 2022).
So far, the vast majority of work focused on the description of these rhythmic behaviors and their brain correlates. We now need to go beyond mere description. We need to understand the mechanisms, meaning the neural operations, underlying rhythmic attentional sampling (see Michel et al., 2022; Galas et al., 2025 for preliminary work). The project SAMPLING will fill this knowledge gap.
Our lab will provide a computational theory of rhythmic attentional sampling functions to mechanistically explain rhythms in perceptual performance across different sensory modalities and attention systems. Our theory will predict precisely and quantitatively various perceptual outcomes. Our lab will record an unprecedented range of behavioral and neurophysiological (EEG, MEG, fMRI) empirical data to test and either reject or refine the theory. A framework for open collaboration including open-source toolboxes and a comprehensive open-access database will allow the research community to challenge and improve the theory. It will also provide clear and tested experimental and analytic recommendations for future research endeavors.
The project SAMPLING will develop and test a novel theory of attention that captures and explains rhythmic sampling, enabling a new era of basic and applied research and development that will optimize performance of healthy individuals and treat disorders of attention.
ERC Starting grant project WAVES
Traveling Waves: Defining the mechanisms allowing attention to occur in space and in time
Brain oscillations have always fascinated both scientists as well as the general public, but their functional role remains ill defined. The research of the Dugué Lab contributed to addressing this issue, and demonstrated that oscillations modulate attentional performance periodically in time (e.g., Dugué et al., 2011; Dugué et al., 2015). Oscillations create periodic windows of excitability, with more or less favorable periods recurring at particular phases of the oscillations. However, attention emerges from systems not only operating in time, but also in space. Previous research has emphasized the temporal aspect of brain oscillations’ behavior. Contemporary investigators rarely consider both temporal and spatial dimensions in their search for the mechanisms linking oscillations and attention. This is the challenge our lab proposed to take on.
Our lab addresses this essential question: How does the spatio-temporal organization of brain oscillations impact attention? We hypothesize that oscillations propagate over the cortical surface, so-called oscillatory Traveling Waves (see our review Dugué and Chavane, 2025), allowing attentional facilitation to emerge both in space and time. We test this original hypothesis using a model-based multimodal functional neuroimaging approach including non-invasive and invasive recordings in humans. Interventional approaches are additionally used to evaluate the degree of causality in the relation between traveling waves and attention (see for example Grabot et al., 2025; Alexander and Dugué, 2026; Kong et al., 2026).
The WAVES project could lead to major progress in cognitive psychology and neuroscience by bridging the gap between spatial and temporal dynamics underlying multi-sensory experience. An important methodological development is also expected. The model-based multimodal functional neuroimaging approach that we are developping and evaluating on a large set of data will provide a new methodological guide for the study of brain activity. Currently, we are working with psychiatrists to investigate whether traveling waves can be used as biomarker for various diseases with the long-term objective to improve diagnosis (see Iftimovici et al., 2025 for preliminary work).