current address

research interests

My scientific interest is focused on the brain processes underlying visual awareness and perceptual organization.  I believe that by revealing the neuronal underpinnings of visual perception, we can gain fundamental insight into one of the most puzzling questions of neuroscience:

Why and how does certain brain activity give rise to subjective experience?

By using ambiguous visual stimuli that evoke more than one perceptual interpretation over time, we are able to isolate perceptual events from sensory processing.  My colleagues and I have been combining multiple techniques, ranging from psychophysics to neurophysiology and fMRI, to answer specific questions such as: What is the role of visual cortex in the construction and maintenance of visual percepts? Are there certain classes of neurons that are specialized for perceptual analysis? How does the visibility of a visual stimulus alter the processing chain within the cortical microcircuitry?

education

1997-2002:     B.Sc./M.Sc. at Ludwig-Maximilians University , Germany

2002-2005:     Ph.D. at the Laboratory of Prof. N.K. Logothetis                                                                                       Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics,                                                                                       Graduate School for Neural and Behavioral Sciences,                                                                           University of Tuebingen, Germany

2004-               Research Fellow at the Laboratory of Dr. D.A. Leopold,                                                                     Unit on Cognitive Neurophysiology and Imaging,                                                                                 National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA

original publications

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 104(13):5620-5625 [see also: ]

Wang, Z., Maier, A., Logothetis, N.K., Liang, H. (2008) Relaxation based feature selection for single-trial decoding of bistable perception. IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering. (in press) 

Wang, Z., Maier, A., Logothetis, N.K. & Liang, H. (2008) Single-trial classification of bistable perception by integrating empirical mode decomposition, clustering and support vector machine. EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing 2008:592742

Wang, Z., Maier, A.,  Logothetis, N.K. & Liang, H. (2008) Single-trial decoding of bistable perception based on sparse nonnnegative tensor decomposition.
Journal of Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience 2008:642387

Wang, Z., Maier, A., Logothetis, N.K., Leopold, D.A., Liang, H. (2007)
Single-trial evoked potential estimation using wavelets.
Computers in Biology and Medicine 37(4):463-473

Wang, Z., Maier, A., Leopold, D.A., Liang, H. (2006)
Relaxation based multichannel signal combination (RELAX-MUSIC) for perceptual decisions using the area under the ROC Curve.
IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering 5(12):2615-2618 

Maier, A., Logothetis, N.K. & Leopold, D.A. (2005) Global competition dictates local suppression in pattern rivalry Journal of Vision 5(9):668-677

Maier, A., Wilke, M., Logothetis, N.K. & Leopold, D.A. (2003) Perception of temporally interleaved ambiguous patterns. Curr. Biol. 13:1076-1085 [see also: HIGHLIGHT: Jones, R. (2003). Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4, 612]

Leopold, D.A., Wilke, M., Maier, A. & Logothetis, N.K. (2002)                                                              
Stable perception of visually ambiguous patterns. 

Nat. Neurosci. 5(6): 605-609 [see also: ]

reviews

Leopold, D.A. & Maier, A. (2006) Neuroimaging: Perception at the Brain's Core Curr. Biol. 16(3): R95-R98

Leopold, D.A., Maier, A. & Logothetis, N.K. (2003) Measuring subjective visual perception in the nonhuman primate. J. Consc. Stud. 10( 9-10): 115-130

book chapters

Leopold, D.A., Maier, A., Wilke, M. & Logothetis, N.K. (2004) Binocular rivalry and the illusion of monocular vision. In: D. Alais & R. Blake (eds.), Binocular rivalry, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [see also: Melcher, D. (2005) When the brain doesn't see eye to eye. TICS 9(5)]

Maier, A. & Leopold, D.A. (2008) Binocular Rivalry. In: Wilken, P., Bayne, T., Cleeremans, A. (eds.) Oxford Companion to Consciousness. Oxford University Press (in press) Maier, A. & Leopold, D.A. (2008) Binocular Rivalry In: Binder, M.D., Hirokawa, N., Windhorst, U., Hirsch, M.C. (eds.) Encyclopedia of Neuroscience. Springer (in press)

Media

Maier, A. (2006) Schlechte Nachrichten fur Gedankenleser [in German]. Bild der Wissenschaft (11/2006)

Maier, A. (2007) Tor zur Seele [in German]. Rheinpfalz am Sonntag 20.05.2007, 19

Consciousness in the single neuron. Science and Consciousness Review. April 17, 2007

honors / awards

2008: NIH Fellows Award for Research Excellence (FARE)

2006: Klaus Tschira Award of the German National Merit Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes)

2006: NIMH Julius Axelrod Memorial Fellowship Award

2004: Ph.D. awarded Summa Cum Laude - University of Tuebingen

conference abstracts

click here for a complete list

professional affiliations      

The Society for Neuroscience (since 2002)

Vision Sciences Society (since 2004)   

Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (since 2005)           

reviewer for     

Science, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, PNAS, Current Biology, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Neuroimage, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Journal of Vision, Journal of Neurophysiology, Biological Cybernetics, Psychophysiology 

read more about what motivates my research:     
The Inexplicable Lightness of Being (Frontiers in Neuroscience © 2007 The Kavli Foundation)

“Every act should have an aim. We must suffer, we must work, we must pay for our place at the game, but this is for seeing's sake; or at the very least that others may one day see.

Geologic history shows us that life is only a short episode between two eternities of death, and that, even in this episode, conscious thought has lasted and will last only a moment. Thought is only a gleam in the midst of a long night.

But it is this gleam which is everything."

[Jules Henri Poincaré]