Collaborateurs·trices

Since 2022, Dr Paul Matusz holds the positions of an assistant professor and a coordinator of Physiotherapy Lab of the Physiotheraphy Section of School of Health Sciences, HES-SO Valais-Wallis. He is also a principal investigator of the Real-World Neuroscience Unit of The SENSE Research & Innovation Center. 

Attentional skills are central for our ability to reach our goals everyday. They help us see, recognize and interact with the objects in the environment, but also learn new information. Yet, most of what we know about attention comes from laboratory studies using just visual information. As such, we have at best incomplete knowledge of how we pay attention in naturalistic, multisensory settings, e.g., in the street, or in school, etc. It is even less clear how these attentional processes change with development, are impaired in disease – but also, how they support the recovery of sensory, brain and physical functions. 

As part of his PhD, Paul used electroencephalography (EEG) to clarify how healthy adults pay attention to multisensory compared to visual distractors and target objects. Subsequently, he completed a post-doc at Department of Experimental Psychology at University of Oxford, where he has been studying the dynamic interplay of attentional skills, multisensory processes and individual’s experience (e.g. amount of schooling) interact and shape basic educational skills in school-aged children. 

In 2014, he moved to Switzerland to complete a postdoctoral training across the Departments of Clinical Neurosciences and Radiology in employing state-of-the-art EEG signal analysis methods to understand the neurocognitive dynamics orchestrating perception, attention and learning in multisensory environments, across the lifespan, in health and disease. In 2016 he received his first competitive grant, from Pierre Mercier Foundation, to study the development of neurocognitive mechanisms of audio-visual attention and their role in shaping educational skills across primary education. Between 2018 and 2022, he led a project funded by the competitive SNSF Ambizione grant, hosted by the MEDGIFT group (Pr. Henning Muller, Institute of Informatics, HES-SO Valais-Wallis). In this project, Paul has designed and developed a randomized clinical trial (RCT) “AMBER”, testing home-based training as treatment for children and adults with amblyopia (lazy eye), integrating serious games, virtual reality (VR), EEG brain imaging and machine learning.