Frank Rösler

• Philipps University of Marburg

Previous studies have suggested that deafness could lead to deficits in motor skills and other body-related abilities. However, the literature regarding motor skills in deaf adults is scarce and existing studies often included participants with heterogeneous language backgrounds and deafness etiologies, thus making it difficult to delineate the eff...

To date, the extent to which early experience shapes the functional characteristics of neural circuits is still a matter of debate. In the present study, we tested whether congenital deafness and/or the acquisition of a sign language alter the temporal processing characteristics of the visual system. Moreover, we investigated whether, assuming cros...

In hearing individuals, vestibular and visuo-spatial functions seem to be functionally linked. Previous studies have suggested that congenitally deaf individuals are at a higher risk for vestibular problems, which in hearing adults have often been found to be associated with impairments in visuo-spatial processing. However, communicating in a signe...

The study of deaf and hearing native users of signed languages can offer unique insights into how biological constraints and environmental input interact to shape the neural bases of language processing. Here, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to address two questions: (1) Do semantic and syntactic processing in a signed language...

We tested the hypotheses of a dual-mechanism account that words resulting from regular word formation are parsed, while irregular formations are retrieved as whole words from lexical memory. German participle formation is of particular interest, since it is concatenative for both regular and irregular participles, resulting from combinations of reg...

„Was Hänschen nicht lernt, lernt Hans nimmermehr“ und „Zum Lernen ist es nie zu spät“ – das sind die beiden Volksweisheiten, die man immer wieder hört, wenn es um Lernen und Gedächtnis geht. Im Alltag lassen sich Belege für beide Positionen beobachten: So haben die meisten von uns erfahren, dass das Lernen einer Fremdsprache in der Schule oder spät...

How are images that have been assembled from their constituting elements maintained as a coherent representation in visual working memory (vWM)? Here, we compared two conditions of vWM maintenance that only differed in how vWM contents had been created. Participants maintained images that they either had to assemble from single features or that the...

The attention to memory theory (AtoM) proposes that the same brain regions might be involved in selective processing of perceived stimuli (selective attention) and memory representations (selective retrieval). Although this idea is compelling, given consistently found neural overlap between perceiving and remembering stimuli, recent comparisons bro...

The lexical representation of complex words in Indo-European languages is generally assumed to depend on semantic compositionality. This study investigated whether semantically compositional and noncompositional derivations are accessed via their constituent units or as whole words. In an overt visual priming experiment (300 ms stimulus onset async...

How do we control the successive retrieval of behaviorally relevant information from long-term memory (LTM) without being distracted by other potential retrieval targets associated to the same retrieval cues? Here, we approach this question by investigating the nature of trial-by-trial dynamics of selective LTM retrieval, i.e., in how far retrieval...

A central question concerning word recognition is whether linguistic categories are processed in continuous or categorical ways, in particular, whether regular and irregular inflection is stored and processed by the same or by distinct systems. Here, we contribute to this issue by contrasting regular (regular stem, regular suffix) with semi-irregul...

The goal of behavioral neuroscience is to map psychological concepts onto physiological and anatomical concepts and vice versa. The present paper reflects on some of the hidden obstacles that have to be overcome in order to find unique psychophysiological relationships. These are, among others: (1) the different status of concepts which are defined...

Direction of gaze (eye angle + head angle) has been shown to be important for representing space for action, implying a crucial role of vision for spatial updating. However, blind people have no access to vision yet are able to perform goal-directed actions successfully. Here, we investigated the role of visual experience for localizing and updatin...

Remembering is more than an activation of a memory trace. As retrieval cues are often not uniquely related to one specific memory, cognitive control should come into play to guide selective memory retrieval by focusing on relevant while ignoring irrelevant information. Here, we investigated, by means of EEG and fMRI, how the memory system deals wit...

This book introduces the rapidly expanding body of imaging research on human memory, and provides thoughtful appraisals of the significance of these findings with regard to fundamental psychological questions. It summarizes findings and methodological approaches and attempts to increase the sensitivity of active researchers and interested consumers...

In the past twenty years, neuroimaging has provided us with a wealth of data regarding human memory. This book asks: to what extent can neuroimaging constrain, support or falsify psychological theories of memory? To what degree is research on the biological bases of memory actually guided by psychological theory? In looking at the close interaction...

We investigated EEG-power and EEG-coherence changes in a unimodal and a crossmodal matching-to-sample working memory task with either visual or kinesthetic stimuli. Angle-shaped trajectories were used as stimuli presented either as a moving dot on a screen or as a passive movement of a haptic device. Effects were evaluated during the different phas...

In our daily life, we often need to selectively remember information related to the same retrieval cue in a consecutive manner (e.g., ingredients from a recipe). To investigate such selection processes during cued long-term memory (LTM) retrieval, we used a paradigm in which the retrieval demands were systematically varied from trial to trial and a...

Many of our daily decisions are memory based, that is, the attribute information about the decision alternatives has to be recalled. Behavioral studies suggest that for such decisions we often use simple strategies (heuristics) that rely on controlled and limited information search. It is assumed that these heuristics simplify decision-making by ac...

The roles of theta and alpha oscillations for long-term memory (LTM) retrieval are still under debate. Both are modulated by LTM retrieval demands, but it is unclear what specific LTM functions they are related to. Here, different oscillatory correlates of LTM retrieval could be obtained for theta and alpha with a paradigm that is suited to monitor...

Many studies provide evidence that information from different modalities is integrated following the maximum likelihood estimation model (MLE). For instance, we recently found that visual and proprioceptive path trajectories are optimally combined (Reuschel et al. in Exp Brain Res 201:853-862, 2010). However, other studies have failed to reveal opt...

The goal of the present study was to investigate the neuroanatomical basis of arithmetic fact retrieval. The rationale was that areas playing a crucial role in arithmetic fact retrieval should show a systematic increase of activation with increasing retrieval effort. To achieve this goal, we utilized the problem-size effect as this is known to be s...

Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging was applied to identify cortical areas involved in maintaining target information in working memory used for an upcoming grasping action. Participants had to grasp with their thumb and index finger of the dominant right hand three-dimensional objects of different size and orientation. Reaching-to-...

Perception self-evidently affects action, but under which conditions does action in turn influence perception? To answer this question we ask observers to view an ambiguous stimulus that is alternatingly perceived as rotating clockwise or counterclockwise. When observers report the perceived direction by rotating a manipulandum, opposing directions...

The present study investigated whether visual and kinesthetic stimuli are stored as multisensory or modality-specific representations in unimodal and crossmodal working memory tasks. To this end, angle-shaped movement trajectories were presented to 16 subjects in delayed matching-to-sample tasks either visually or kinesthetically during encoding an...

Few studies have reported direct effects of motor learning on visual perception, especially when using novel movements for the motor system. Atypical motor behaviors that violate movement constraints provide an excellent opportunity to study action-to-perception transfer. In our study, we passively trained blindfolded participants on movements viol...

There is considerable evidence that targets for action are represented in a dynamic gaze-centered frame of reference, such that each gaze shift requires an internal updating of the target. Here, we investigated the effect of eye movements on the spatial representation of targets used for position judgements. Participants had their hand passively pl...

Blindfolded participants performed one-dimensional movements towards a mechanical stop and back to the start. After a varying delay, they had to reproduce the encoded target position by a second mechanically unrestricted movement. Average event-related potentials accompanying the "encoding" and the "reproduction" movements revealed a biphasic waves...

The neural basis underlying the generation of nouns and verbs is still not completely understood. In classical generation tasks, specific features of the produced words can hardly be controlled. Therefore, the observed neural correlates of noun and verb production cannot be directly related to differences in specific features of the generated words...

The dorsal stream has been proposed to compute vision for space perception and for the control of action. However, perceiving space and guiding movements is not only based on vision but also on other sensory modalities such as proprioception and kinesthesia. Blind people who lost vision early in life provide an exceptional example to study the plas...

Many studies demonstrated a higher accuracy in perception and action when using more than one sense. The maximum-likelihood estimation (MLE) model offers a recent approach on how perceptual information is integrated across different sensory modalities suggesting statistically optimal integration. The purpose of the present study was to investigate...

To date, much is known about the neural mechanisms underlying working-memory (WM) maintenance and long-term-memory (LTM) encoding. However, these topics have typically been examined in isolation, and little is known about how these processes might interact. Here, we investigated whether EEG oscillations arising specifically during the delay of a de...

This study investigated whether form and meaning relatedness modulate the processing of morphologically related German verbs. In two overt visual priming experiments, we compared responses for verb targets (kommen, come) that were preceded by a purely semantically related verb (nahen, approach), by a morphologically and semantically related verb (m...

The present study investigated the neuroanatomical basis of different solution processes in single-digit multiplication by means of fMRI. Sixteen participants silently produced the solution of three distinct types of multiplication, i.e., problems involving zero (e.g., 3*0), small (e.g., 2*4), or large operands (e.g., 8*7). Zero and small problems...

This chapter examines behavioural, neurophysiological, and neuroimaging studies that reveal dissociations between storage or retrieval of clearly distinct, global stimulus categories, less distinct stimulus categories, and fine-grained distinctions within object categories. These results clearly show that material-specific cortical networks exist w...

The present study tested whether non-visual spatial experience affects later acuity of space perception. Congenitally blind adults who differed in the age acquired spatial knowledge via an orientation and mobility (O&M) training and matched sighted controls performed passive arm movements and judged the direction of the sensed movement. Propriocept...

In two experiments, we investigated how short-term memory of kinesthetically defined spatial locations suffers from either motor or cognitive distraction. In Exp. 1, 22 blindfolded participants moved a handle with their right hand towards a mechanical stop and back to the start and then reproduced the encoded stop position by a second movement. The...

This study investigated whether verbs in figurative language activate different types of associations than do verbs in literal language. In a sentence-priming experiment, we compared idiomatic sentences and literal sentences that comprised the same verb. The German perfect tense is of particular interest here, since the verb (i.e. the past particip...

The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to delineate cortical networks that are activated when objects or spatial locations encoded either visually (visual encoding group, n = 10) or haptically (haptic encoding group, n = 10) had to be retrieved from long-term memory. Participants learned associations between auditorily present...

In the present study we investigated whether imitation of artificial movement trajectories of meaningless objects has an effect on how these trajectories are later perceptually processed within the human brain. During observation of a sequence of artificial object movements 10 participants (experimental group) actively imitated the trajectories dur...

The primate dorsal pathway has been proposed to compute vision for action. Although recent findings suggest that dorsal pathway structures contribute to somatosensory action control as well, it is yet not clear whether or not the development of dorsal pathway functions depends on early visual experience. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging,...

Recent findings suggesting that switch costs in the task-cuing paradigm are largely attributable to a change in the task-indicating cue have been interpreted in terms of a priming model of task-switch costs (Logan & Bundesen, 2003). According to this explanation, participants do not actually switch task sets, but merely use a cue-stimulus compound...

This review summarizes experimental studies that investigated the relationship between DC-recorded slow event-related potentials (slow waves) of the electroencephalogram (EEG) and the hemodynamic BOLD response, as measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Slow waves have been found to accompany a large number of cognitive processe...

There is wide agreement that the "dorsal (action) stream" processes visual information for movement control. However, movements depend not only on vision but also on tactile and kinesthetic information (=haptics). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the present study investigates to what extent networks within the dorsal stream are also ut...

In a recent study we could show that during observation of artificial object movements a similar cortical network, including the areas of the so-called human mirror neuron system (hMNS), was activated as during the observation of hand movements. The present study investigated whether activation of the hMNS during the observation of artificial objec...

Animal studies have shown that visual deprivation during the first months of life permanently impairs the interactions between sensory systems. Here we report an analogous effect for humans who had been deprived of pattern vision for at least the first five months of their life as a result of congenital binocular cataracts. These patients showed re...

This study investigated whether German participles are retrieved as whole words from lexical storage or whether they are accessed via their morphemic constituents. German participle formation is of particular interest, since it is concatenative for both regular and irregular verbs and results from combinations of regular/irregular stems with regula...

Behavioral research has led to conflicting views regarding the relationship between working memory (WM) maintenance and long-term memory (LTM) formation. We used slow event-related brain potentials to investigate the degree to which neural activity during WM maintenance is associated with successful LTM formation. Participants performed a WM task w...

Higher visual functions were investigated in patients treated for bilateral congenital cataracts in two experiments. Participants were asked to detect either real or illusory contours (Kanizsa squares in Experiment 1 or one of four different Kanizsa contours in Experiment 2) among distractor items. Compared to normally sighted participants matched...

We report a series of event-related potential experiments designed to dissociate the functionally distinct processes involved in the comprehension of highly restricted lexical-semantic relations (antonyms). We sought to differentiate between influences of semantic relatedness (which are independent of the experimental setting) and processes related...

This study investigated whether verbs in figurative language activate different types of associations than do verbs in literal language. In a sentence-priming experiment, we compared sentences featuring verbs in idiomatic phrases with control sentences in which the same verbs were meant literally. Participants made lexical decisions about nouns tha...

Reorienting of visuospatial attention can be investigated by comparing reaction times to validly and invalidly cued targets (“validity effect”). The cholinergic agonist nicotine reduces the validity effect and neural activity in the posterior parietal cortex. Behavioral effects of nicotine in nonsmokers are weak and it has been suggested that diffe...

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The present study investigated the neurophysiological processes underlying associative long-term memory retrieval of objects and spatial positions by means of a modified fan paradigm with cued recall and two neuroimaging methods (electroencephalogram [EEG] and functional magnetic resonance imaging). In an acquisition phase, either one stimulus or t...

Ruchkin and Johnson (1991) claim that the mode of responding used by Rösler & Heil (1991) may have camouflaged effects of a negative slow wave that Ruckin et al. (1988) had found to be related to the difficulty of mental calculation problems. This criticism is addressed by three arguments which support the interpretation of Rösler and Heil (1991)....

Goal of the present study was to compare the amplitude and topography of EEG alpha activity between congenitally blind and sighted adults both in a primarily sensory and a primarily cognitive task. Congenitally blind and blindfolded sighted adults performed a somatosensory perception task (experiment 1), which required to discriminate tactile stimu...

The present study investigated the relation of brain activity patterns measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and slow event-related potentials (ERPs) associated with a complex cognitive task. A second goal was to examine the neural correlates of spatial imagery of haptically--instead of visually--acquired representations. Using...

This functional magnetic resonance imaging study investigates the effects of nicotine in a cued target detection task when changing cue reliability. Fifteen non-smoking volunteers were studied under placebo and nicotine (Nicorette polacrilex gum 1 and 2 mg). Validly and invalidly cued trials were arranged in blocks with high, middle and low cue rel...

We tested whether visual stimulus material that is assumed to be processed in different cortical networks during perception (i.e., faces and spatial positions) is also topographically dissociable during long-term memory recall. With an extensive overlearning procedure, 12 participants learned paired associates of words and faces and words and spati...

Participants respond more quickly to two simultaneously presented target stimuli of two different modalities (redundant targets) than would be predicted from their reaction times to the unimodal targets. To examine the neural correlates of this redundant-target effect, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to auditory, visual, and bimodal s...

Motivated by models that propose material-specific cortical long-term memory representations we expected different topographies of event-related slow waves of the EEG during cued retrieval of two distinct types of information (faces and spatial positions), which are assumed to be processed and stored in topographically distinct cortical areas, i.e....

Since its discovery in 1929, the electroencephalogram (EEG) has become a widely used tool in experimental psychology. Although originally the merits of the method were seen first of all in an improvement of medical diagnostics it was soon understood by psychologists that the EEG can also be used to study psychic processes in healthy participants. T...

The plural morphology of German is characterised by five different plural allomorphs (-(e)n, -e, -er, -s, zero), partly combined with changes in the vowel (umlaut). While in former studies the -s plural allomorph is identified as the regular plural, the remaining forms are categorised as irregular. These observations have been discussed within the...

This fMRI study investigates the differences between a blocked and event-related analysis in a cued target detection task, the so-called Posner paradigm, using a hybrid design. Validly and invalidly cued trials were presented intermingled in different blocks containing 50%, 75%, or 100% valid trials. Four analyses were conducted: (i) an event-relat...

It has been shown that stimuli of a task-irrelevant modality receive enhanced processing when they are presented at an attended location in space (crossmodal attention). The present study investigated the effects of visual deprivation on the interaction of the intact sensory systems. Random streams of tactile and auditory stimuli were presented at...

It has been hypothesized that some aspects of a second language (L2) might be learned easier than others if a language is learned late. On the other hand, non-use might result in a loss of language skills in one's native, i.e. one's first language (L1) (language attrition). To study which, if any, aspects of language are affected by either late acq...

It has been hypothesized that zero vs. nonzero operands in single-digit multiplication problems invoke distinct solution strategies. We studied such problems in an implicit production task with event-related brain potentials (ERPs) recorded from 61 scalp positions in 18 participants. The topography of a slow negative wave, which accompanied the imp...

Event-related potentials were recorded to substantiate the claim of a distinct psycholinguistic status of (a) pronouns vs. proper names and (b) ellipses vs. proper names. In two studies 41 students read sentences in which the number of intervening words between the anaphor and its antecedent was either small or large. Comparing the far with the nea...

When participants have to respond to stimuli of two modalities, faster reaction times are observed for simultaneous, bimodal events than for unimodal events (the redundant target effect [RTE]). This finding has been interpreted as reflecting processing gains for bimodal relative to unimodal stimuli, possibly due to multisensory interactions. In ran...

Researchers have known for more than a century that crossing the hands can impair both tactile perception and the execution of appropriate finger movements. Sighted people find it more difficult to judge the temporal order when two tactile stimuli, one applied to either hand, are presented and their hands are crossed over the midline as compared to...

Spectral power and coherence of the electroencephalogram was measured while subjects read either a verb or a noun which initiated a short meaningful phrase. For both types of words theta-power decreased substantially relative to a prestimulus baseline at left anterior electrode sites. All other frequency bands showed less (alpha, beta) or no effect...

Event-related potentials were recorded with 61 electrodes from 16 students who verified either the correctness of single-digit multiplication problems or the semantic congruency of sentences. Multiplication problems varied in size and sentence fragments in constraint. Both semantic and arithmetic incongruencies evoked a typical N400 with a clear pa...

Zusammenfassung: Studien mit blinden Menschen stellen eine ausgezeichnete Moglichkeit dar, die Adaptivitat des Zentralnervensystems im Humanbereich zu untersuchen. Fallen Eingange aus einem Sinneskanal aus, ist das System starker auf die Leistung der verbleibenden Modalitaten angewiesen. Hier stellt sich die Frage, ob bzw. inwieweit der Verlust ein...

The identity of working-memory and long-term memory representations follows from many lines of evidence. However, the data provided by Ruchkin et al. are hardly compelling, as they make unproved assumptions about hypothetical generators. We cite studies from our lab in which congruent slow-wave topographies were found for short-term and long-term m...

Evidence for the contribution of the neocortex to memory is overwhelming. However, the theory proposed by Ruchkin et al. does not only ignore subcortical contributions, but also introduces an unnecessary and empirically unsupported division between the posterior cortex, assumed to represent information, and the prefrontal cortex, assumed to control...

Several recent reports suggest compensatory performance changes in blind individuals. It has, however, been argued that the lack of visual input leads to impoverished semantic networks resulting in the use of data-driven rather than conceptual encoding strategies on memory tasks. To test this hypothesis, congenitally blind and sighted participants...

The present study investigated with event-related potentials whether attending to a moment in time modulates the processing of auditory stimuli at a similar early, perceptual level as attending to a location in space. The participants listened to short (600 ms) and long (1,200 ms) intervals marked by white noise bursts. The task was to attend in al...

The aim of the present study was to enforce the priming of either nouns or verbs in order to evoke word-category-specific N400 effects. In two experiments two primes which were either a verb-noun or a noun-noun pair were followed by a semantically related or unrelated target which was a noun or verb, respectively. This target always completed the w...

An increasing number of animal and human studies suggests that different sensory systems share spatial representations in the brain. The aim of the present study was to test whether attending to auditory stimuli presented at a particular spatial location influences the processing of tactile stimuli at that position and vice versa (crossmodal attent...

While several studies have reported a deviation from the normal time course of language acquisition in blind children others have provided evidence for a more efficient processing of the language input in blind than sighted adults. The present study used a semantic and morpho-syntactic priming paradigm to address the question at which processing st...

The present study investigated differences in sequential learning between subjects who were or were not informed of the presence of a repeating sequence (intentional or incidental group, respectively). Subjects had to learn a 16-letter-long repeating sequence that was irregularly disrupted by deviating stimuli. Reaction times indicated that both gr...

The serial reaction time task has been widely used to investigate implicit learning mechanisms. In the present study, we investigated the effect of stimulus distance on learning of a spatial sequence independent of a sequence of responses. Participants had to respond to objects appearing at four different locations. The objects were presented in a...

The capability of the central nervous system (CNS) to adapt its functional and structural organization to current requirements is known as neural plasticity. Such changes can be examined at different organizational levels of the CNS; changes at the molecular-, synaptic-, neural-, system-, and behavioral level are mutually dependent (Shaw & McEacher...

The hypothesis of distinct memory codes proposes that entities belonging to global categories as verbal and spatial representations, or to more specific categories as faces, objects, living or non-living entities, are stored and reactivated in functionally separate memory partitions. In this chapter we will summarize evidence which supports this pr...

Neurophysiological recordings and neuroimaging data in blind and deaf animals and humans suggest that perceptual functions may be organized differently after sensory deprivation. It has been argued that neural plasticity contributes to compensatory performance in blind humans, such as faster speech processing. The present study employed functional...

If a peripheral target follows an ipsilateral cue with a stimulus-onset-asynchrony (SOA) of 300 ms or more, its detection is delayed compared to a contralateral-cue condition. This phenomena, known as inhibition-of-return (IOR), affects responses to visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli, and is thought to provide an index of exogenous shifts of spa...

Recent data from lesion and brain imaging studies have questioned the well-established assumption of a close functional-anatomic link between syntax and Broca's area and semantics and Wernicke's area. In the present study we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neuroanatomical correlates of semantic and syntactic fun...

We investigated whether verbs and nouns evoke comparable behavioral and N400 effects in a primed lexical decision task. Twenty-nine students were tested, 13 in a pilot study in which only response times and error rates were collected and 16 in a study in which ERPs were recorded from 124 scalp electrodes. Stimuli were noun-noun and verb-verb pairs...

Blind people must rely more than sighted people on auditory input in order to acquire information about the world. The present study was designed to test the hypothesis that blind people have better memory than sighted individuals for auditory verbal material and specifically to determine whether memory encoding and/or retrieval are improved in bli...

We investigated the contribution of motor processes to implicit and explicit serial learning by means of event-related brain potentials. An otherwise predictable sequence of S-R pairs was occasionally interrupted by stimuli that violated either the stimulus or the response sequence (perceptual or motor deviants). After performing the task, particip...

Zusammenfassend kann festgehalten werden: Blinde Menschen nutzen das haptische System zur Kompensation fehlender Eingänge über das Sehsystems und es gibt darüber hinaus Hinweise darauf, dass sie taktile Informationen effizienter als Sehende auswerten. Blinde Kinder können auch ohne visuelle Rückmeldung lernen, haptische Objekte systematisch zu erfa...

Event-related brain potentials were recorded to study whether verbs and nouns activate topographically distinct cortical generators. Fifteen subjects performed a primed lexical decision task with verb/verb and noun/noun pairs. The relatedness between prime and target items was varied in three steps (unrelated, moderately, and strongly related) and...