Aashritaa Gopalakrishnan

About Me

I have always been amazed by the complexity of the human brain and decided to study neuroscience so I could better understand the inner workings of human memory. Over the course of my education, I became very interested in cognitive neuroscience and expanded my research interests to other aspects of human cognition like decision making and perception. My master’s thesis on auditory memory introduced me to the field of auditory neuroscience and perception, a path that ultimately led to my current work on auditory false percepts.

Outside of research, I enjoy spending my time knitting/crocheting, cooking and reading murder-mysteries.

Research

My project will investigate the neurobiological foundations of false auditory percepts in healthy humans.

Perception arises from the integration of top-down predictions and bottom-up sensory information, but impairments in this process can result in false perceptual experiences, i.e., perception in the absence of sensory stimulation. Many studies have implicated overly strong expectations but there is a growing body of evidence to support feedforward contributions to false percepts, particularly when sensory input is unclear or noisy. The use of laminar fMRI has been advantageous to this research as it allows for the separation of feedback and feedforward signals in cortical layers. However, most of this work has been carried out in the visual modality. Studies in the auditory domain have focused on individuals with hallucinations or psychosis, with little known about false auditory percepts in non-clinical populations. My project aims to establish a behavioural paradigm that elicits false auditory percepts in healthy human subjects. Further, we will use laminar fMRI to look at brain activity associated with these false percepts.

Methods

  • Behavioural measures
  • fMRI
  • MATLAB

Qualifications and Professional Experience

  • October 2025 – Present: PhD candidate at Maastricht University supervised by Prof. Dr. Federico de Martino, Prof. Dr. Sonja Kotz and Dr. Joost Haarsma
  • 2023-2024: MRes in Brain Sciences at University College London
    • Thesis: Differences in long-term explicit and implicit memory for tone pattern sequences (supervised by Prof. Maria Chait)
  • 2021-2022: Laboratory Scientist at Lighthouse Labs in Glasgow
  • 2018-2021: BSc Hons in Neuroscience at University of Glasgow
    • Thesis: Role of the retrosplenial cortex in decision-making (supervised by Dr. Michael Kohl)