Professor Dr Sabine Kastner

Research Priorities: Cognitive neuroscience, visual cognition, primate electrophysiology, functional medical imaging, attention and visual systems
Sabine Kastner is a German-American neuroscientist. She teaches neuroscience and psychology at Princeton University in the USA. The main focus of her research is the neural basis of visual and attention processes in primate brains as a basis of understanding healthy and pathological brain functions.
She uses a translational approach that combines the medical imaging of the human brain with physiological knowledge about patients with brain injuries or damage. Comparable studies on catarrhine monkeys show the part attributable to evolution. Sabine Kastner’s work focuses on gaining a better understanding of how large networks interact during different cognition processes, particularly concentrating on the interplay between the thalamus and the cerebral cortex. In studies of humans and macaques, Kastner’s team, in collaboration with other neuroscientists and researchers, discovered that attention is subject to a fast rhythmic process between concentration and distraction. As a result Sabine Kastner provided key contributions to a range of research questions, for example on the selection of behaviourally relevant information and the neural processes behind this, on the functional organisation of the human visual system on the level of the thalamus and the cortex, on the representation of object information in the temporal and parietal cortex, and on the development of cognitive performance and the associated neural networks in children. 
Her studies on attention have provided more in-depth insights into the structure, function and dynamics of the underlying networks and are therefore extremely pertinent. These insights also shed new light on attention deficits in childhood.
Furthermore, Sabine Kastner is the Editor in Chief of the international journal “Progress in Neurobiology” and the open access journal “Frontiers for young minds/understanding neuroscience” and edited the “Handbook of Attention” (2014). She promotes and supports the scientific education of children as well as students, postdoctoral students and junior scientists.