Natascha Roos defends thesis 28 February

Link to live-stream

Damage to the brain often leads to problems when communicating with others. Although this can heavily affect people’s quality of life, we still do not know much about the recovery processes that happen in the brain after it is damaged. During her PhD, Roos' goal was to come up with an approach to study this recovery in the brain after a stroke. In particular, she focused on the recovery of language functions and how they reorganize in the brain if some areas are damaged. For this, she used a picture naming task embedded in the context of a sentence. This task allowed her to study processes in the brain during language comprehension as well as production.

However, to use this task to study changes in the brain after a stroke, Roos first had to determine the most suitable neuroimaging method for recording brain activity of participants with brain damage over time. For this, she tested picture naming in combination with different neuroimaging methods such as EEG, MEG, and fMRI, as well as their consistency across sessions. Throughout the studies reported in this doctoral thesis, she thus paved the way to investigate language recovery after a stroke.