the Imagine Reality Lab

Dr. Nadine Dijkstra
n.dijkstra [at] ucl.ac.uk

Nadine is a principal research fellow at the Department of Imaging Neuroscience (the FIL), University College London, where she leads the Imagine Reality Lab. She studied psychology and cognitive neuroscience before completing a PhD in artificial intelligence at the Donders Institute in the Netherlands. Her research aims to understand the relationship between mental imagery and perception in the human brain by using a combination of psychophysics, neuroimaging, machine learning and computational modeling.

Dr. Giulia Cabbai
g.cabbai [at] ucl.ac.uk

Giulia joined the lab in February 2025 to work as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow after completing a PhD and postdoc in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Sussex Attention Lab (University of Sussex). She is interested in how voluntary and involuntary mental imagery are generated in the brain, their variation among individuals and their impact on our perception and behaviour. In the lab, she will investigate how control over imagery influences our sense of reality. To do so, she will employ a combination of behavioural and neuroimaging approaches.

Paz Bar-Tal
paz.bartal.24 [at] ucl.ac.uk

Paz investigates the neural mechanisms at the boundary between imagery and perception, focusing on how scene context influences our perceptual reality monitoring. After completing her B.Sc and M.Sc at Bar-Ilan University, where she worked on “virtual hallucinations” in VR environments, Paz joined the Imagine Reality Lab in 2024 as a PhD candidate in the Ecological Brain DTP program, supported by UCL’s Research Excellence scholarship. Her doctoral research explores the blurry lines between mental imagery and perception, examining how contextual congruence shapes our ability to distinguish between imagined and real experiences.

Martha Cottam
martha.cottam.23 [at] ucl.ac.uk

Martha is a PhD student at University College London on the LIDo doctoral training programme. She joined after completing an MSc in Translational Neuroscience at Imperial College London. Her current research seeks to investigate the neural and computational mechanisms underpinning perceptual awareness using computational modelling, MEG and laminar fMRI.

Ryan Jepson
ryan.jepson.25 [at] ucl.ac.uk

Ryan is a PhD student at University College London on the MRC doctoral training programme. In a 3-month rotation in the Imagine Reality Lab, Ryan will use fMRI dynamic causal modelling to investigate the brain region connectivity underlying mental imagery. He has previously completed an MPhil in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, and a BSc/BA at the University of New South Wales.

Ataol Burak Özsu
a.ozsu [at] ucl.ac.uk

Ataol completed his BA in Psychology at Bilkent University, where he investigated the top-down and bottom-up mechanisms underlying visual attention. Following his growing interest in mental imagery and consciousness, he joined the Imagine Reality Lab in 2025 as a research assistant on the structured adversarial collaboration project ETHOS. He will study higher-order representations of imagined, perceived, and unconscious stimuli using MEG.