Neuroscience Psychology AI

OLIVERCONTIER

Studying how the human brain represents the visual world. Using large-scale neuroimaging, behavior, and AI.

01

About

Portrait of Oliver Contier
Leipzig, 2024

My work focuses on visual cognition: how does the brain transform the complex signal entering our eyes into neural codes that reflect our subjective experience of the world and support every-day behavior?

To that end, I use large-scale neuroimaging methods and naturalistic designs to measure each brain intensively. I connect this large-scale brain activation to AI-driven computational models of vision and language to build comprehensive models of individual brains. 

Another focus is reproducible, community-driven neuroscience: building, sharing, and maintaining open datasets that help drive discovery.

02

Selected Work

Read: Distributed representations of behaviour-derived object dimensions
Nature Human Behaviour 2024

Distributed representations of behaviour-derived object dimensions in the human visual system

A comprehensive characterization of how the brain organizes our understanding of the objects we see.

object vision fMRI behavior
Read: THINGS-data
eLife 2023

THINGS-data: large-scale multimodal datasets for object representations in brain and behavior

Open datasets for studying object representations across brain (fMRI, MEG) and behavior.

open data fMRI MEG behavior
All publications →
03

Background & Activities

Current Position

2025–
Postdoctoral Researcher
Vision and Computational Cognition Lab · Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
Computational Cognitive Neuroscience and Quantitative Psychiatry · Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany

Education

2025
Doctorate (PhD, Dr. rer. nat.)
University of Leipzig, Germany
2019–20
Max Planck School of Cognition
Advanced graduate program
2018
M.Sc. Psychology
Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany
2014
B.Sc. Psychology
Trier University, Germany

Impact Metrics

558Citations
6h-index
1.3k+Downloads

Data as of May 2026 · Google Scholar

Awards & Scholarships

2026
Walter Benjamin Postdoctoral Fellowship
2022
Open Science Prize
IGOR · Division of Biological and Neuropsychology · German Psychological Association
2019–20
Doctoral scholarship
2017

Reviewer Activities

04

Publications

Peer-reviewed

Conference posters & talks

Tweaks

Off