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Professor Natasha Sigala

Professor Natasha Sigala (BSc, MSc, PhD, PGDipLATHE, MRSB)

Professor of Neuroscience
E: N.Sigala@bsms.ac.uk
T: +44 (0)1273 678939
Location: Room 208 Trafford Centre for Medical Research, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9RY

DA contact details: Laura Arnold
E: L.Arnold@bsms.ac.uk

Area of expertise: Cognitive Neuroscience; learning and memory, working memory, visual perception, categorisation, attention, development of expertise.

Research areas: Psychophysics and MR imaging in Cognitive Neuroscience.

Other relevant positions: Director of Doctoral Studies (BSMS).

BACKGROUND IMAGE FOR PANEL

Biography

Natasha studied Biology at the University of Patras, Greece, where she then completed an MSc in Human and Animal Physiology. In 1997 she moved to Germany, where she earned her PhD with summa cum laude in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and the Eberhard Karls University of Tuebingen. With the fancy title of Doctor rerum naturalis she joined the Dept of Exp. Psychology at the University of Oxford and the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit Cambridge in 2002, and worked between the two places until 2010, when she joined BSMS as a Senior Lecturer in Neuroscience.

Research

Natasha’s work has focused on learning and memory:

BACKGROUND IMAGE FOR PANEL

Teaching

Natasha teaches on the Neuroscience and Behaviour Module for undergraduate Medical and Neuroscience students, and supervises Individual Research Projects and postgraduate research projects (Master’s, PhD and MD).

Selected publications

Sigala N, Cobandag M, Leppard L and Medford N (2026) Insight and executive functions in acquired brain injury: empirical evidence and theoretical frameworks. Front. Neurol. 17:1884495. doi: 10.3389/fneur.2026.1884495

Kyriazis, D., Uji, M., Bouyagoub, S., Cercignani, M., Ford, P. R., & Sigala, N. (2025). Functional and diffusion-based microstructural correlates in cortical and subcortical substrates of motor performance of a complex visuomotor task in middle-aged adults. Journal of Integrative Neuroscience, 24(7).

Saunders C, Bawa H, Aslanyan D, Coleman F, Jinadu H, Sigala N, Medford N. Treatment outcomes in the inpatient management of severe functional neurological disorder: a retrospective cohort study. BMJ Neurol Open. 2024 Jul 2;6(2):e000675. doi: 10.1136/bmjno-2024-000675. PMID: 38979396; PMCID: PMC11227748.

Medford N and Sigala N (2023) Case report: Clinical lycanthropy in Huntington's disease. Front. Psychiatry 14:1089872. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1089872.

Phelan S, Sigala N. The effect of treatment on insight in psychotic disorders - A systematic review and meta-analysis. Schizophr Res. 2022 Jun;244:126-133. doi: 10.1016/j.schres.2022.05.023. Epub 2022 Jun 2. PMID: 35661550.

Pfeifer G, Ward J, Sigala N. (2019) Reduced Visual and Frontal Cortex Activation During Visual Working Memory in Grapheme-Color Synaesthetes Relative to Young and Older Adults. Front Syst Neurosci. 2019 Jul 10;13:29. doi: 10.3389/fnsys.2019.00029. eCollection 2019

Critchley, H., & Sigala, N. (2019). Brain Imaging and Function. In C. Llewellyn, S. Ayers, C. McManus, S. Newman, K. Petrie, T. Revenson, et al. (Eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Psychology, Health and Medicine (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology, pp. 175-178). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pfeifer G, Ward J, Chan D, Sigala N. Representational Account of Memory: Insights from Aging and Synesthesia. J Cogn Neurosci. 2016 Dec;28(12):1987-2002. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_01014. Epub 2016 Jul 26. PMID: 27458751.

L. Minati & N. Sigala (2013) Effective connectivity reveals strategy differences in an expert calculator, PLoS One 8(9): e73746.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0073746 pp. 1-12

Stokes M., Kusunoki M., Sigala N., Nili H., Gaffan D., Duncan J. (2013) Dynamic coding for cognitive control in prefrontal cortex, Neuron 78: 1-12, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2013.01.039.

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