Question: what made you want to be a scientist and work on all these new cool thing that might change the world one day all because you love your job and you are willing to help others as your job

Paul Matusz answered on 11 Nov 2018:

Hi,

I was always interested in how we process information in the busy, complex, multisensory environments. So that’s forever motivated my research – I started from studying how what we know about the way we attend and learn differs when we use simple, typically used stimuli, like coloured shapes to stimuli that carry emotional information, like fearful faces or threatening words. From there I went to another “salient” category of stimuli – those engaging multiple senses at once – multisensory stimuli.

So the goal of my research right now is to use what we know about the mind and the brain and the tools of neuroimaging to better understand and improve people’s functioning in real environments. That is, thge aim of the research of mine and my group is to better understand the brain and cognitive mechanisms allowing us to see and interact in real-world environments, such as the classroom, high-street or at home. Filling out these lacks in knowledge is probably the most important for supporting how children learn every day as well as in rehabilitation of different disorders – from kids not seeing very well (like when they have a “lazy eye” to kids having problem with learning or older adults who have problems with their memory. To help these people, I am at the same time interested in how we can use technology – tablets, virtual reality, even robots – to make learning – and rehabilitation (often very boring and very long!) more fun and engaging and more adjustable to when children / patients are ready to do all this “learning”.
So to me these are very exciting times, because we are finally crossing into studying “problems” (like “learning”) from all possible points of view at the same time – what we know about the mind (psychology), about the brain (neuroscience and brain imaging), the potential of technology (engineering and educational psychology) and important of health (medicine).