On monday, the 4th of November, there will be an online information event concerning potential topics for bachelor theses in the department Biological Psychology. If you are interested please email to get the meeting link. The information event will be repeated beginning of next year.

The preliminary programm of the colloquium for winter 2024/25 is now online.  

Tone occurrence can be predictable by self-performed actions, by observed actions, and by cues. Presenting tones only in 50% of the trials, Sophie Egan, Alexander Seidel, Constanze Weber, Marta Ghio, and Christian Bellebaum found modulation of tone processing by prediction error, which was stronger for self-generated tones.

Dana Huvermann won a poster prize of the German organization “Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychophysiologie und ihre Anwendung“ on this year’s meeting „Psychologie und Gehirn“ in Hamburg. The preprint to the poster is available at https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/a8hbx. Congratulations!

Constanze Weber and Christian Bellebaum have now published a new article in which they investigate the representation of prediction errors in the processing of immediate and delayed feedback by means of computational modelling and single-trial analysis of the event-related potential (ERP). Despite differences in the brain areas involved in learning from immediate and delayed feedback, we show that positive prediction errors (better than expected) are similarly reflected in the RewP and P300 component of the ERP. Link: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-60328-8

Is the cerebellum involved in performance monitoring? Adam Berlijn, in collaboration with Dana Huvermann, Prof. Dr. Christian Bellebaum, Sandra Schneider and PD Dr. Martina Minnerop from Forschungszentrum Jülich, Prof. Dagmar Timmann-Braun from Essen University Hospital and Prof. Dr. Jutta Peterburs from the Medical School Hamburg, have shown in a systematic review that the cerebellum is involved in learning through external feedback and that this behavior changes in the damaged cerebellum. These findings support the model of performance monitoring. The results originate from the joint DFG project investigating the cerebellum in error and feedback processing.

The article can be retrieved here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12311-024-01669-y

Adam Berlijn, in collaboration with Dana Huvermann, Prof. Dr Christian Bellebaum, Manfred Mittelstädt, Dr Stefan Groiss and Prof. Dr Alfons Schnitzler from Düsseldorf University Hospital, PD Dr Martina Minnerop from Forschungszentrum Jülich, Prof. Dagmar Timmann Braun from Essen University Hospital and Prof. Dr Jutta Peterburs from the Medical School Hamburg were able to show that transcranial magnetic stimulation at precisely defined times during the processing of a Go/Nogo Flanker task results in a reduction in the amplitude of the error-related negativity (ERN), an event-related potential, when the cerebellum is stimulated. This influence was not present when a control site (vertex) was stimulated. These findings support the model of performance monitoring, which sees the cerebellum as an important structure for processing errors. The results come from the joint DFG project on research into the cerebellum. The results originate from the joint DFG project investigating the cerebellum during error and feedback processing.

The article is available via this link: https://doi.org/10.1162/imag_a_00080

In a behavioral study in cooperation with the Medical School Hamburg, Julian Vahedi, Annakarina Mundorf, Christian Bellebaum and Jutta Peterburs show that the Pavlovian bias in feedback learning can be reduced when learning from emotional cues. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00426-024-01946-9 

Adam Berlijn has won a poster award for the "Best Scientific Poster" in the category "Multiple Brains" at the 11th Annual Retreat of the INM in Jülich! Congratulations!

Laura Bechtold co-authored a freshly published consensus paper on brain signatures of embodied semantics and language. The consensus paper is part of a special issue following the embodied and situated language processing (ESLP) conference. The international and interdisciplinary team of co-authors joined their expertise in neuroscientific methods of embodied language processing in order to give insights into the state of the art and challenging and promising future steps of the research field: “future directions now call for enhancing the external validity of findings by acknowledging the multimodality, multidimensionality, flexibility and idiosyncrasy of embodied and situated language and semantic processes”. Don’t miss out on this exciting read! The consensus paper is available here: https://doi.org/10.5334/joc.237

Laura Bechtold won a poster prize of the German organization „Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychophysiologie und ihre Anwendung“ on this years‘ meeting “Psychologie und Gehirn” in Tübingen. Congratulations!

Great success for Marta Ghio: The DFG funds the project Marta has applied for with the title “Investigating the grounding of abstract concepts in experiential, magnitude related brain networks” for a duration of three years. Congratulations and good luck!

In a behavioral and an EEG experiment, Dana Huvermann used a priming paradigm with concrete and abstract target words to investigate how word meaning, semantic control processes, and different semantic relations influence integration processes and processing speed. Take Home Message? Semantic control processes are important whether a target word is concrete or abstract, and they depend heavily on the ambiguity of the prime. The ambiguity of the primes was estimated from the versatility of the contexts in which they occur, for which we collaborated with Andreas Funke from the computer science department. Fun Fact about the study? The data in the behavioral experiment was collected by our undergraduate students as part of the Experimental Practicum. Laura Bechtold will present the data next week at the Psychology and Brain in Tübingen, you can find the poster in the OSF project for preprint. Link

In a study now accepted for publication in “Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience”, Christine Albrecht and Christian Bellebaum investigated the effects of error severity on the processing of own and observed actions. To this end, participants’ brain activity while playing the piano was recorded. This study is the third from Christine’s  dissertation to be published.

Another study on the processing of tones that were generated by an observed action: With simultaneous EEG acquisitions Sophie Egan, Marta Ghio and Christian Bellebaum show that the results are explained partly by temporal predictability but not by individualism. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2023.108575

Delaying feedback during learning does not only result in a change in active brain areas, but also to a different representation of the learned material. In a newly published article in Psychophysiology, Christine Albrecht, Ruben van de Vijver and Christian Bellebaum show a connection between the N170, a feedback-associated ERP component that is possibly related to hippocampus activity, and the performance in a later free recall test. You can read the article via this link: https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.14324

The preliminary programm of the colloquium for summer 2023 is now online.  
Link

New publication in „Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience“: In earlier work we found that the processing of sensory stimuli is altered, when these stimuli are caused by observed actions. In a new study by Constanze Weber and Alexander Seidel we could now show that this effect depends on the viewpoint on the observed action. The Link to the Abstract will follow.

Already published as a preprint, the study on the role of emotionality in learning novel abstract concepts has now been accepted for publication by the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition! The study emerged from Linda Espey's master's thesis under the direction of Laura Bechtold in collaboration with Marta Ghio and Christian Bellebaum. Reviewer feedback was overwhelmingly positive, in part because all materials, data, and analysis codes were made publicly available in the associated Open Science Framework project (https:// https://osf.io/gjc8p/).

Preregistration of studies is becoming increasingly popular and takes an important step to increase the transparency and replicability of research and to address the prevailing publication bias. In fMRI preregistered by Laura Bechtold, Christian Bellebaum and Marta Ghio, the brain activity of expert mathematicians is measured while they read abstract words with a mathematical meaning. The study aims to test the hypothesis that increasing levels of expertise lead word processing to rely more heavily on a mathematical-numerical brain network. For more on the background, design, and planned analyses, visit: https://osf.io/8uh5y

Is our gaze behavior influenced by our personal and social preferences? Adam Berlijn, in cooperation with Lea Hildebrandt and Matthias Gamer from the University of Würzburg, shows in a new article in the Journal of Vision to what extent fixations on social features occur consistently across observers and whether this preference can be transferred to other measures of social prioritization in the laboratory and in the real world. The article can be found at this Link.

The preliminary programm of the colloquium for winter 2022/23 is now online. 

Link

New publication in “Scientific Reports”: In her master thesis Jacqueline Metzlaff investigated error processing in Tourette Syndrome. Based on this work she has now published a paper in cooperation with the Institute of Clinical Neuroscience and Medical Psychology at HHU and the Universities of Lübeck and Hannover.

“I didn’t see a hammer.” But your brain did! In a paper just accepted on Cortex, Marta Ghio and Christian Bellebaum, in collaboration with Marco Tettamanti (University of Milano-Bicocca), showed that tool object perception increases reciprocal effective connectivity coupling among regions of the object-directed action representation system, independently from perceptual awareness.  doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2022.04.005

The preliminary programm of the colloquium for summer 2022 is now online.  Link

Good news from the DFG:

Marta Ghio and Christian Bellebaum received  funding for a common project with the title "The processing of immediate and delayed feedback – a critical role of the learned type of association?" The project will start next year and run for three years.

„The doorbell rings, but you act as if you’re not home so you don’t have to get up.“ Sounds familiar? Participants learned novel concepts like this in a linguistic training study, which Linda Espey, Marta Ghio, Christian Bellebaum, and Laura Bechtold just published as preprint on psyArxiv. You can find out how emotionality and mental imagery influence learning novel concepts here: https://psyarxiv.com/sarp4

At the beginning of October Marta Ghio has started again as Post-Doc in our department, after she has been working at the University of Trento for the last two years. Welcome back!

The preliminary programm of the colloquium for winter 2021/22 is now online.  Link

Surprise, surprise! When we observe actions of others, our brain primarily processes how surprising it is what we see. The degree of surprise can be influenced by our trait empathy. This is reported by Christine Albrecht and Christian Bellebaum in a new publication in Psychophysiology.

What happens in your brain when you eat up that whole bag of chips? Dana Huvermann attempted to answer that question in her first paper that was just accepted for publication in the journal Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience. Together with Christian Bellebaum and Jutta Peterburs she shows that the selective devaluation of snacks (by consumption of a certain snack until satiety) is not only reflected in reduced hedonic ratings of the snack, but also modulates neural processing of the snack as reflected in the event-related potential. Here, without selective devaluation, the signal was most positive for the participant’s favourite snack and less positive for less preferred snacks. This pattern changed after selective devaluation, i.e., when the favourite snack had been eaten until satiety: here, the signal decreased to the level of less preferred but still liked snacks.

 The  schedule of our colloquium for the summer semester 2021 is now online. You can find it here.

An article by Laura Bechtold and Christian Bellebaum in international cooperation with Paul Hoffman and Marta Ghio has been accepted for publication in “Scientific Reports”. The study comprising two experiments investigated the context-dependent processing of concrete and abstract words. More will follow shortly.

An article by Laura Bechtold and Christian Bellebaum in international cooperation with Paul Hoffman and Marta Ghio has been accepted for publication in “Scientific Reports”. The study comprising two experiments investigated the context-dependent processing of concrete and abstract words. More will follow shortly.

First paper for Alexander Seidel: In cooperation with Bettina Studer from the Institute of Clinical Neuroscience and Medical Psychology at HHU Alexander, Marta Ghio (University of Trento) and Christian Bellebaum could show that the extent of the "Illusion of Control" affects the processing of self-generated sounds. The paper is published in the journal "Psychophysiololgy".

The first paper of 2021 in the first week of January, the new year could not be off to a better start! In a new paper in the journal Psychological Research, Jutta Peterburs (now a professor at MSH Medical School Hamburg), Christine Albrecht, and Christian Bellebaum investigated the interplay between the Pavlovian learning bias and individual levels of social anxiety. They found that high levels of social anxiety in concert with a propensity to learn better from negative feedback hamper the overcoming of Pavlovian bias in a win context while facilitating response inhibition in an avoidance context.

Manuscript accepted for publication in the “Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience”: Together with Marta Ghio Sophie Egan and Christian Bellebaum published the first paper from our lab with simultaneous EEG acquisition in two study participants. The study is about the processing of stimuli that are either caused by own or observed actions. More details will follow.

First paper for Christine Albrecht: As she shows in a study which was accepted today in "Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience", empathy affects the building of expectations concerning observed actions, which, in turn, determines the processing of these actions. Congratulations, Christine!

Today Constanze Weber starts as a PhD student in the department of Biological Psychology. A good start for you, Constanze!

New publication in the journal Brain & Cognition! Together with her former Master student at University of Münster, Elisabeth Schrammen, and her collaborators Prof. Dr. Gina Grimshaw at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and PD Dr. Sebastian Ocklenburg at Ruhr-University Bochum as well as her PhD student Adam Berlijn, Dr Jutta Peterburs recently investigated the role of functional hemispheric asymmetries for perceptual and inhibitory processes in the context of a go/nogo task with emotional faces in a large sample of left- and right-handers. The PDF for the article can be accessed here.

With Dana Huvermann also the second PhD student hired in Juttas DFG project on the role of the cerebellum in feedback processing has started. Adam Berlijn had already started some weeks earlier. Welcome Dana and Adam!