Andrea Hildebrandt

Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg · Department of Psychology

Individuals born preterm are at risk of developing a variety of sequelae. Audiovisual integration (AVI) has received little attention despite its facilitating role in the development of socio-cognitive abilities. The present study assessed the association between prematurity and in-vivo reconstructed fiber bundles among brain regions relevant for A...

Introduction: Mobile health care solutions such as a Virtual Hearing Clinic (VHC) can improve quality, accessibility and equity of health services, fostering early rehabilitation for hearing loss. A VHC might be the first contact with a hearing diagnostic service and should motivate users with hearing loss to seek professional help. A psychological...

Face processing-a crucial social ability-is known to be carried out in multiple dedicated brain regions which form a distinguishable network. Previous studies on face processing mainly targeted the functionality of face-selective grey matter regions. Thus, it is still partly unknown how white matter structures within the face network underpins abil...

For supporting clinical decision-making in audiology, Common Audiological Functional Parameters (CAFPAs) were suggested as an interpretable intermediate representation of audiological information taken from various diagnostic sources within a clinical decision-support system (CDSS). Ten different CAFPAs were proposed to represent specific functiona...

Over the last decades, cognitive psychology has come to fair consensus about the human intelligence ontological structure. However, it remains an open question, whether anatomical properties of the brain support the same ontology. The present study explored the ontological structure derived from neuroanatomical networks associated with performance...

Enfacement illusions are traditionally elicited by visuo-tactile stimulation, but more active paradigms become possible through the usage of virtual reality techniques. For instance, virtual mirrors have been recently proposed to induce enfacement by visuo-motor stimulation. In a virtual mirror experiment, participants interact with an avatar that...

Parental socio-economic status (SES) is often found to be associated with children's language competence in the first decade of life. To examine the effect of SES on children's vocabulary development, as well as potential compensatory effects of schooling and learning-related activities, we examined the joint and unique effects of parental educatio...

For theoretical and practical reasons, it is of great interest to understand how accurate and persistent episodic memories of enjoyable experiences are formed and maintained, for example, in the context of gastronomy and other instances of experience design. Here, we investigated factors that might affect the quality (a measure of coherence) of imm...

Audiovisual integration has been related with cognitive-processing and behavioral advantages, as well as with various socio-cognitive disorders. While some studies have identified brain regions instantiating this ability shortly after birth, little is known about the structural pathways connecting them. The goal of the present study was to reconstr...

According to the shared signal hypothesis (SSH) the impact of facial expressions on emotion processing partially depends on whether the gaze is directed toward or away from the observer. In autism spectrum disorder (ASD) several aspects of face processing have been found to be atypical, including attention to eye gaze and the identification of emot...

Objective: This study investigated the effects of different adjustment criteria and sound scenes on self-adjusted hearing-aid gain settings. Self-adjusted settings were evaluated for speech recognition in noise, perceived listening effort, and preference. Design: This study evaluated a semi-supervised self-adjustment fine-tuning procedure that p...

Functional connectivity studies have demonstrated that creative thinking builds upon an interplay of multiple neural networks involving the cognitive control system. Theoretically, cognitive control has generally been discussed as the common basis underlying the positive relationship between creative thinking and intelligence. However, the literatu...

The course of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) from adolescence into adulthood shows large variations between individuals; nonetheless determinants of interindividual differences in the course are not well understood. A frequent problem in ADHD, associated with worse outcomes, is emotion dysregulation. We investigated whether emotion...

Over the past decades, the neuropsychological science community has endeavored to determine the number and nature of distinguishable human cognitive abilities. Based on covariance structure analyses of inter-individual performance differences in multiple cognitive tasks, the ability structure has been substantiated with sufficient consensus. Howeve...

Emotion dysregulation is common in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It is highly prevalent in young adult ADHD and related to reduced well-being and social impairments. Neuroimaging studies reported neural activity changes in ADHD in brain regions associated with emotion processing and regulation. It is however unknown whether defic...

The study of socio-cognitive abilities emerged from intelligence research, and their specificity remains controversial until today. In recent years, the psychometric structure of face cognition (FC)—a basic facet of socio-cognitive abilities—was extensively studied. In this review, we summarize and discuss the divergent psychometric structures of F...

Significance Mastering diverse cognitive tasks is crucial for humans. We study how the brain’s functional organization at rest is configured to support diverse cognitive phenotypes. Emphasizing the multilevel, hierarchical modular structure of brain’s functional connectivity to derive eigenmode-based measures, we demonstrate that the resting brain’...

A high realism of avatars is beneficial for virtual reality experiences such as avatar-mediated communication and embodiment. Previous work, however, suggested that the usage of realistic virtual faces can lead to unexpected and undesired effects, including phenomena like the uncanny valley. This work investigates the role of photographic and behav...

Diverse cognitive processes set different demands on locally segregated and globally integrated brain activity. However, it remains unclear how resting brains configure their functional organization to balance the demands on network segregation and integration to best serve cognition. Here, we use an eigenmode-based approach to identify hierarchica...

Emotion dysregulation is common in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It is highly prevalent in adult ADHD and related to reduced well-being and social impairments. Neuroimaging studies reported neural activity changes in ADHD in brain regions associated with emotion processing and regulation. It is however unknown whether deficit in...

Face processing is a key ability facilitating social cognition. Only a few studies explored how nature and nurture shape face processing ontogeny at the behavioral and neural level. Also, very little is known about the contributions of nature and nurture to the establishment of white matter fibers supporting this specific human ability. The main pu...

Given the crucial role of face recognition in social life, it is hardly surprising that cognitive processes specific for faces have been identified. In previous individual differences studies, the speed (measured in easy tasks) and accuracy (difficult tasks) of face cognition (FC, involving perception and recognition of faces) have been shown to fo...

At the group level, women consistently perform better in face memory tasks than men and also show earlier and larger N170 components of event-related brain potentials (ERP), considered to indicate perceptual structural encoding of faces. Here we investigated sex differences in the relationship between the N170 and face memory performance in 152 men...

The application of machine learning for the development of clinical decision-support systems in audiology provides the potential to improve the objectivity and precision of clinical experts' diagnostic decisions. However, for successful clinical application, such a tool needs to be accurate, as well as accepted and trusted by physicians. In the fie...

The e4 allele of the APOE gene is strongly associated with impaired brain functionality and cognitive decline in humans at older age. It is controversial whether and how the APOE e4 allele is affecting brain activity among young healthy individuals and how such effects may contribute to individual differences in cognitive performance. Signal comple...

Previous studies investigated the relationship between facial asymmetry, perceived attractiveness and peoples' traits. The diversity of results might be due to methodological issues and poor standardization between asymmetry scoring methods. We evaluate two traditional scoring methods, the Horizontal Angular Asymmetry (HAA) and the Horizontal Fluct...

Recent empirical evidence reveals that creative idea generation builds upon an interplay of multiple neural networks. Measures of temporal complexity yield important information about the underlying mechanisms of these co-activated neural networks. A few neurophysiological studies investigated brain signal complexity (BSC) during the production of...

Divergent thinking (DT) is an important constituent of creativity that captures aspects of fluency and originality. The literature lacks multivariate studies that report relationships between DT and its aspects with relevant covariates, such as cognitive abilities, personality traits (e.g. openness), and insight. In two multivariate studies (N = 15...

We investigated specific mechanisms and electrophysiological correlates (event-related potentials, ERPs) of perceiving eye gaze and emotional facial expressions and their interaction in mothers with 2-6 months old infants and nullipara women. We expected a special sensitivity to infant pictures, especially in mothers; we presented pictures of both...

Previous studies investigated the relationship between facial asymmetry, perceived attractiveness and peoples' traits. The diversity of results might be due to methodological issues and poor standardization between asymmetry scoring methods. We evaluate two traditional scoring methods, the Horizontal Angular Asymmetry (HAA) and the Horizontal Fluct...

The entropy profiles of cortical activity have become novel perspectives to investigate individual differences in behaviour. However, previous studies have neglected foundational aspects of individual entropy profiles, i.e., the test-retest reliability, the predictive power for cognitive ability in out-of-sample data, and the underlying neuroanatom...

At the group level, women consistently perform better in face memory tasks than men and also show earlier and larger N170 components of event-related brain potentials (ERP), considered to indicate perceptual structural encoding of faces. Here we investigated sex differences in the relationship between the N170 and face memory performance in 152 men...

Does parental involvement or formal education reduce the often found competence gap between children from different socioeconomic backgrounds? To answer this question, we examined the joint and unique effects of parental education, socioeconomic status, and home learning environment on children’s vocabulary competence and growth in early childhood....

Multiple experimental, neuropsychological, and individual differences studies indicated that faces are processed (e.g. perceived and memorized) differently from non-face objects. It was suggested that face specificity is a result of configural processing which is different from a rather part-based processing of other objects. In this research, we i...

In this chapter, we illustrate how local structural equation modeling can be used to study the moderation effects of continous context variables on developmental trajectories. More specifically, we investigated the effects of parental education on students' reading and math ability acquisition across four school years. We used data from the Nationa...

Objectives The current study aims to examine the construct of empowerment in the context of a transition education program. Patient education programs strive to empower adolescents with chronic conditions to take responsibility for their own health care to manage their transition from pediatric to adult medicine. Our study aimed to identify the cor...

Given the crucial role of face processing in social life, it is hardly surprising that cognitive processes have been demonstrated to be specific for faces. In previous studies on individual differences in face cognition (FC), the speed (measured in easy tasks) and accuracy (in difficult tasks) of FC have been found to form distinct abilities, going...

Research in cognitive neuroscience has extensively demonstrated that the temporal dynamics of brain activity are associated with cognitive functioning. The temporal dynamics mainly include oscillatory and 1/f noise-like, non-oscillatory brain activities that coexist in many forms of brain activity and confound each other's variability. As such, obs...

The ε4 allele of the apolipoprotein (APOE) gene is a widely recognized genetic risk factor for developing Alzheimer’s disease in older age. However, it is controversial whether there is a positive impact of the APOE ε4 allele on human cognitive performance in young adulthood, possibly representing a case of antagonistic pleiotropy. Here we explored...

Face cognition, the ability to perceive faces and interpret facial information, is a crucial skill in human social interactions. At the neurobiological level, several functionally specialized brain regions constitute a network of face processing. However, the evidence whether functional specialization within the face network is also reflected in th...

Face cognition (FC) is a specific ability that cannot be fully explained by general cognitive functions. Cortical thickness (CT) is a neural correlate of performance and learning. In this registered report, we used data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) to investigate the relationship between CT in the core brain network of FC and performance...

Face cognition (FC) is a distinct social ability [1] instantiated in the core network of FC [2], consisting of: FFA, OFA and pSTS 1 • Cortical thickness (CT) in the FFA, as a correlate of neural plasticity, was found to predict FC [3] • We analyzed individual differences in FC ability and CT in the core face network with structural equation modelin...

Faces are a major source of information in social interaction. The ability to perceive and interpret faces thus carries paramount importance in people’s social lives. However, this crucial ability is not yet fully understood. Individual differences studies show that the speed and accuracy of face cognition (including perception and memory/recogniti...

Background Cerebrovascular pathology, quantified by white matter lesions (WML), is known to affect cognition in aging, and is associated with an increased risk of dementia. The present study aimed to investigate whether higher functional connectivity in cognitive control networks mitigates the detrimental effect of WML on cognition. Methods Nondem...

Recent research on individual differences in object cognition (OC) focused on determining how objects group together, and what type of processing lies behind the clusters—a single domain-general or multiple domain-specific processes. The expertise hypothesis suggests that all object categories are processed by the same mechanism that is responsible...

Cognitive experimental and neuroscientific research in adults indicates that an important property of face perception is its specificity and reliance on configural processing. In addition, individual differences in face perception between adults cannot be entirely explained through general cognitive functioning and object cognition. Although recent...

Perception of emotion in the face is a key component of human social cognition and is considered vital for many domains of life; however, little is known about how this ability differs across the lifespan for men and women. We addressed this question with a large community sample (N = 100,257) of persons ranging from younger than 15 to older than 6...

Knowing what makes a top gastronomy experience unique and retrievable in the long term is of interest for scientific and economic reasons. Recent attempts to isolate predictors of the hedonic evaluation of food have afforded several factors, such as individual and social attributes, or liking/disliking profiles. However, in these studies relevant v...

[This corrects the article on p. 250 in vol. 11, PMID: 29326567.].

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is one of the most prominent paradigms employed for the assessment of risk taking in the laboratory, and it was shown to distinguish between various patient groups and controls. The present study was conducted to test the psychometric characteristics of the original IGT and of a new gambling task variant for assessing i...

Digit ratio (2D:4D) and facial width-to-height ratio (WHR) are supposedly static indicators of testosterone exposition during prenatal and pubertal lifetime, respectively. Both measures have been linked to aggressive and assertive behavior in laboratory economic games, as well as in real world scenarios. Most of the research-often limited to male s...

The Val¹⁵⁸Met polymorphism influences the activity of the Catechol-O-Methyl-Transferase (COMT), an enzyme involved in dopamine metabolism. Dopamine availability is vital for prefrontal functions. Therefore researchers claimed that Val¹⁵⁸Met is causal for cognitive abilities. Published findings from single studies report mixed results. This meta-ana...

Facial identity and facial expression processing are crucial socio-emotional abilities but seem to show only limited psychometric uniqueness when the processing speed is considered in easy tasks. We applied a comprehensive measurement of processing speed and contrasted performance specificity in socio-emotional, social and non-social stimuli from a...

The enhanced N1 component in event-related potentials (ERP) to face stimuli, termed N170, is considered to indicate the structural encoding of faces. Previously, individual differences in the latency of the N170 have been related to face and object cognition abilities. By orthogonally manipulating content domain (faces vs objects) and task demands...

Based on a large individual differences study, Bö ckler, Tusche, and Singer aimed to develop and psychometrically evaluate measurement procedures that capture individual differences in multiple facets of human prosociality. Bö ckler et al. claimed that they identified four reliable and method-independent subcomponents of human prosociality: altruis...