Dr Darinka Trübutschek (D.)

I am a cognitive neuroscientist interested in how the human brain creates and stores subjective experiences—how we perceive the world, form memories, and make decisions. My research combines psychophysics and eye-tracking with invasive (iEEG) and non-invasive electrophysiology (EEG/MEG), computational modeling, and machine learning to understand how sensory inputs are transformed into personal experience, and how that process is shaped by our past and guided by our (future) goals. 

I am also committed to making science more open, inclusive, and transparent, and enjoy being involved in open-science initiatives like the EEGManyPipelines project. 

If you are also interested in these questions, feel free to reach out or learn more on my website.

Expertises

I study how the brain transforms sensory input into subjective experience—how we perceive, remember, and make sense of the world around us. 

My expertise lies at the intersection of perception, memory, and consciousness, with a particular focus on how past experiences shape current perception. I use invasive and non-invasive time-resolved electrophysiological methods (intracranial EEG, EEG, MEG), paired with behavioral experiments, eye-tracking, and machine learning, to track how information unfolds in the brain in real time. 

By bridging brain dynamics with behavior, I aim to uncover the neural mechanisms behind both conscious and non-conscious experience—and I am always excited to connect with others interested in these questions and/or methodology.

Career history

Before joining Maastricht University as an Assistant Professor in 2025, I worked and trained in the U.S., France, the U.K., and Germany. 

I completed my PhD in Paris with Stanislas Dehaene, studying how conscious perception and working memory interact, and later explored how our memories and expectations shape what we see—first in Oxford with Mark Stokes, then at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt with Lucia Melloni

I have been fortunate to receive support from programs like the Marie Curie Fellowship, and I care deeply about making science more open, inclusive, and collaborative—for example through my involvement in initiatives like the EEGManyPipelines project

At Maastricht, my goal is to build an interdisciplinary group to investigate how perception and memory shape one another in artificial systems and humans across development, sensory modalities, and real-world contexts—with the long-term aim of developing a unifying theory of how the brain constructs subjective experience.