Laura Busse (born c. 1977) is a German neuroscientist and professor of Systemic Neuroscience within the Division of Neurobiology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Busse's lab studies context-dependent visual processing in mouse models by performing large scale in vivo electrophysiological recordings in the thalamic and cortical circuits of awake and behaving mice.
Early life and education
Busse was born in Germany in 1977. She had an early interest in brain studies and received a scholarship from the State of Bavaria that supported her studies in basic psychology at the University of Leipzig, in Leipzig, Germany from 1997 to 1999. Busse then pursued further studies at the Max Planck Research School at the University of Tübingen in Germany where she focused in Neural and Behavioral Sciences from 1999 to 2001.
During her time at Tübingen, Busse pursued research abroad for her Master's in Neuroscience. She moved to the United States for 6 months where she studied under the mentorship of Marty Woldorff at Duke University. Busse explored the cognitive underpinnings of attention in the human brain in the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University. After successfully completing her Master's in 2001, Busse stayed at Duke University for another year to work as a research technician, continuing to explore the neurobiological underpinnings of cognition using various imaging techniques such as fMRI, EEG, and ERP.
In late 2002, Busse pursued her doctoral work back in Germany at the German Primate Center Göttingen and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience. Busse worked under the mentorship of Stefan Treue, where she entered the field of visual processing, exploring the neural basis of visual perception using non-human primates as a model organism. Busse completed her PhD in neuroscience in 2006 and then moved back to the United States for one year funded by the Leopoldina Postdoctoral Scholarship. Busse completed her postdoctoral work at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, USA in 2007 and then moved to the Institute of Ophthalmology at the University College London, in the United Kingdom to work as a Research Associate under the mentorship of Matteo Carandini from 2008 to 2010. Under Carandini, Busse explored visual processing in the cat V1 and visual behavior in mice.
Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention
In the Woldorff Lab, Busse explored caveats to fMRI experimental trial structure in human fMRI experiments. Since fMRI experiments often suffer from extensive overlap of adjacent trial brain signals, experimenters started to implement “null” or “no-stim” trials in order to provide time for extraction of stimulus generated signal during non-event trials. However, Busse sought to explore the hypothesis that “null-event” trials actually evoke unique brain activity patterns, called the omitted stimulus response (OSR). In an auditory task, Busse found significant OSRs, defined by an early posterior negative wave followed by a larger anterior positive wave, across a variety of stimulus rates and omitted stimulus percentages. Her work provided not only insight into the brain's OSR but also to the caveat associated with using OSRs as a “null” trial.
Busse then published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences exploring the phenomenon of cross-modal attentional spreading. Busse found that when a subject is paying attention to a stimulus in one sensory modality, it increases the subject's attention to a non-related stimulus in a different sensory modality. This finding elucidated the idea that simultaneous yet disconnected stimuli can be grouped into one multisensory object enhancing the cognitive processing that is allocated to both stimuli.