Helen Blank

Systems neuroscience session| “I know you! Hierarchical predictive processing in speech and face perception“

Helen Blank is Professor of Predictive Cognition at Ruhr University Bochum, where she leads a research group investigating how prior expectations shape human perception and communication. She is also affiliated with the Research Center One Health Ruhr within the University Alliance Ruhr and leads projects on Prediction in Communication as part of an Emmy Noether group, as well as contributing to the TRR 289 at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf.

She completed her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences where she investigated multisensory integration of faces and voices during human communication. During her postdoctoral research at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit she combined computational modeling and multivariate fMRI to study how prior expectations enhance the perception of degraded speech. She later worked as a Marie Curie Fellow at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf.

Her research focuses on how the brain integrates prior knowledge with sensory input to support perception, particularly in speech and person recognition. Combining behavioural experiments, neuroimaging, and computational approaches, her work aims to uncover the neural mechanisms that enable humans to interpret ambiguous sensory information and communicate effectively in complex environments.