Neuroscience Psychology AI

OLIVERCONTIER

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

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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.

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Selected Work

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
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 →
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Background & Activities

Current Position

2025–
Postdoctoral Researcher
Vision and Computational Cognition Lab · Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig
FundingWalter Benjamin Fellowship (DFG)

Education

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

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