Margot Steijger
Master student of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Amsterdam
Welcome to my website, where I would like to tell you something about myself and my activities.
At the moment, I am a master student of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at UvA. I work at a student assistant at the Behavioural Science Lab of UvA since November 2019. I help researchers conduct MRI research, among other things. On top of that, I became a board member of the Student
Union Cognito. I am responsible for acquisition and external relations. In my free time I like to go outside for a walk, preferably in nature. I
also really enjoy swimming. Not surprising that I started synchronised swimming when I was six and continued to do so until about a year ago.
Research projects
My first research project was a bachelor internship with the research group Conscious Brain Lab led by Dr. S. van Gaal. I contributed to a study that is trying to investigate the effect of perceptual and attentional blindness on recurrent processing (thought to be essential to consciousness) and metacognition with EEG. This study is a follow-up on the study done by Fahrenfort et al. (2017), with the difference of adding metacognition and performance matching between the two types of blindness. Due to the COVID-19 situation that started during my internship, I didn’t get to collect data. I did, however, help designing the study and wrote an pre-registration for it.
My next research project will start in February at the C.J. Gorter Center of LUMC. Together with my supervisors, I will try to distangle the BOLD from the fMRS signal to improve the MRS (magnetic resonance spectroscopy) imaging technique. I will do this by looking at the change in the T2 value of metabolites during a visual task.
Hobbies
In my free time I can be found outside in nature or in the swimming pool. Both swimming and outdoor activities give me a feeling of freedom and reassurance.
Other things I do to relax are reading tales of Toon Tellegen (or other books will do just fine), listening to classical music and/or drink a nice cup of tea.
Gap year & STA!
Something that has been important to me my whole life, is theatre. Both watching and being part of a play makes me very happy and serve as an outlet for my feelings and emotions. I chose to focus on acting for one year during my Gap Year in the States. During this year I learned that I saw acting as a hobby and not a career path and that I was very interested in the mysteries of the human brain. I applied to the bachelor “Psychobiologie” (sort of neuroscience) and became member of STA!, Student Theatre association Amsterdam. This picture of me was the last play I was in, called “Picnick op het slagveld”.