Hauke R Heekeren

Hauke R Heekeren
University of Hamburg | UHH · Department of Psychology

Prof. Dr.

About

335
Publications
107,996
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17,997
Citations
Additional affiliations
January 2010 - present
Max-Planck-Institut für Kognitions- und Neurowissenschaften
January 2009 - February 2022
Freie Universität Berlin
Position
  • Professor
January 2008 - December 2012

Publications

Publications (335)
Article
Background The human stress response is characterized by increases in neuromodulators, including norepinephrine (NE) and cortisol. Both neuromodulators can enter the brain and affect neurofunctional responses. Two brain areas associated with stress are the amygdala and the hippocampus. The precise influence of NE and cortisol on the amygdala and hi...
Article
Full-text available
Observational learning is essential for the acquisition of new behavior in educational practices and daily life and serves as an important mechanism for human cognitive and social-emotional development. However, we know little about its underlying neurocomputational mechanisms from a developmental perspective. In this study we used model-based fMRI...
Article
Full-text available
Successful recovery from stress is integral for adaptive responding to the environment. At a cellular level, this involves (slow genomic) actions of cortisol, which alter or reverse rapid effects of noradrenaline and cortisol associated with acute stress. At the network scale, stress recovery is less well understood but assumed to involve changes w...
Article
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Previous research has shown that people intrinsically value non-instrumental information, which cannot be used to change the outcome of events, but only provides an early resolution of uncertainty. This is true even for information about rather inconsequential events, such as the outcomes of small lotteries. Here we investigated whether participant...
Article
Full-text available
Structural and functional changes in cortical and subcortical regions have been reported in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), however, a multimodal approach may provide deeper insights into the neural correlates of neuropsychiatric symptoms. In this multicenter study, we measured cortical thickness (CTh) and subcortical volumes to...
Article
Full-text available
Decisions that require taking effort costs into account are ubiquitous in real life. The neural common currency theory hypothesizes that a particular neural network integrates different costs (e.g., risk) and rewards into a common scale to facilitate value comparison. Although there has been a surge of interest in the computational and neural basis...
Preprint
Previous research has shown that people intrinsically value non-instrumental information, which cannot be used to change the outcome of events, but only provides an early resolution of uncertainty. This is true even for information about rather inconsequential events, such as the outcomes of small lotteries. Here we investigated whether participant...
Article
Full-text available
The ventromedial prefrontal-cortex (vmPFC) is known to contain expected value signals that inform our choices. But expected values even for the same stimulus can differ by task. In this study, we asked how the brain flexibly switches between such value representations in a task-dependent manner. Thirty-five participants alternated between tasks in...
Article
The medial temporal lobe (MTL), including the hippocampus (HC), perirhinal cortex (PRC), and parahippocampal cortex (PHC), is central to memory formation. Reward enhances memory through interplay between the HC and substantia nigra/ventral tegmental area (SNVTA). While the SNVTA also innervates the MTL cortex and amygdala (AMY), their role in rewar...
Article
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When children learn to read, their neural system undergoes major changes to become responsive to print. There seem to be nuanced interindividual differences in the neurostructural anatomy of regions that later become integral parts of the reading network. These differences might affect literacy acquisition and, in some cases, might result in develo...
Article
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Choices are influenced by gaze allocation during deliberation, so that fixating an alternative longer leads to increased probability of choosing it. Gaze-dependent evidence accumulation provides a parsimonious account of choices, response times and gaze-behaviour in many simple decision scenarios. Here, we test whether this framework can also predi...
Preprint
Full-text available
Learning allows humans and animals to make predictions about the environment and increases the likelihood of adaptive behavior. Studying the mechanisms through which humans regulate learning to update their predictions in the face of uncertainty can also shed light on maladaptive behaviors in various clinical and age groups. Drawing on normative le...
Article
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Costly punishment describes decisions of an interaction partner to punish an opponent for violating rules of fairness at the expense of personal costs. Here, we extend the interaction process by investigating the impact of a socio-emotional reaction of the opponent in response to the punishment that indicates whether punishment was successful or no...
Article
Language-specific orthography (i.e., letters or bigrams that exist in only one language) is known to facilitate language membership recognition. Yet the contribution of continuous sublexical and lexical statistics to language membership decisions during visual word processing is unknown. Here, we used pseudo-words to investigate whether continuous...
Article
Full-text available
Studies in decision neuroscience have identified robust neural representations for the value of choice options. However, overall values often depend on multiple attributes, and it is not well understood how the brain evaluates different attributes and integrates them to combined values. In particular, it is not clear whether attribute values are co...
Preprint
Full-text available
Recent developments of open-source online eye-tracking algorithms suggests that they may be ready for use in online studies, thereby overcoming the limitations of in-lab eye-tracking studies. However, to date there have been limited tests of the efficacy of online eye-tracking for decision-making and cognitive psychology. In this online study, we e...
Article
Choosing how much effort to expend is critical for everyday decisions. While several neuroimaging studies have examined effort-based decision-making, results have been highly heterogeneous, leaving unclear which brain regions process effort-related costs and integrate them with rewards. We conducted two meta-analyses of functional magnetic resonanc...
Article
Visual perspective taking (VPT) is a critical ability required by complex social interaction. Non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) has been increasingly used to examine the causal relationship between brain activity and VPT, yet with heterogeneous results. In the current study, we conducted two meta-analyses to examine the effects of NIBS of the r...
Article
Full-text available
The main objective of this longitudinal study was to investigate the neural predictors of reading acquisition. For this purpose, we followed a sample of 54 children from the end of kindergarten to the end of second grade. Preliterate children were tested for visual symbol (checkerboards, houses, faces, written words) and auditory lan- guage process...
Preprint
Full-text available
Visual perspective taking (VPT) is a critical ability required by complex social interaction. Non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) has been increasingly used to examine the causal relationship between brain activity and VPT, yet with heterogeneous results. In the current study, we conducted two meta-analyses to examine the effects of NIBS of the r...
Poster
Full-text available
Many people eat specific foods to distract themselves from, or cope with, negative affect such as stress, anxiety, or fear, [1,2,3]. Most such “comfort” foods are indulgent, sweet, carbohydrate- and fat-rich and therefore provide immediate satisfaction. Negative emotions can also increase the salience of immediate, concrete goals, thereby increase...
Preprint
Full-text available
Value representations in ventromedial prefrontal-cortex (vmPFC) are known to guide decisions. But how preferable available options are depends on one's current task. Goal-directed behavior, which involves changing between different task-contexts, therefore requires to know how valuable the same options will be in different contexts. We tested wheth...
Preprint
Full-text available
Choices are influenced by gaze allocation during deliberation, so that fixating an alternative longer leads to increased probability of choosing it. Gaze-dependent evidence accumulation provides a parsimonious account of choices, response times and gaze-behaviour in many simple decision scenarios. Here, we test whether this framework can also predi...
Preprint
Full-text available
Forming new memories is a fundamental part of human life, and the medial temporal lobe (MTL) is central to memory formation. Recent research suggests that within MTL, the perirhinal and parahippocampal cortices (PRC, PHC) process object and scene memory, respectively, whereas the hippocampus (HC) is agnostic to stimulus category. It is unclear, how...
Preprint
Full-text available
Choosing how much effort to expend is a critical for everyday decisions. While effort-based decision-making is altered in common psychopathologies and many neuroimaging studies have been conducted to examine how effort is valued, it remains unclear where the brain processes effort-related costs and integrates them with rewards. Using meta-analyses...
Preprint
Full-text available
In natural settings, learning and decision making often takes place under considerable perceptual uncertainty. Here we investigate the computational principles that govern reward-based learning and decision making under perceptual uncertainty about environmental states. Based on an integrated perceptual and economic decision-making task where unobs...
Article
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The present study has been designed to disentangle cognitive and emotional dimensions of empathy in a group of mentally healthy and highly alexithymic individuals (ALEX, n = 24) and well-matched controls (n = 26) through questionnaire Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) and Multifaceted Empathy Task (MET) used during the fMRI and after the fMRI. S...
Preprint
Full-text available
Decision making can be a complex process requiring the integration of several attributes of choice options. Understanding the neural processes underlying (uncertain) investment decisions is an important topic in neuroeconomics. We analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from an investment decision study for stimulus-related effec...
Article
Full-text available
Human decisions are often influenced by emotions. An economically relevant example is the role of fear in generating loss aversion. Previous research implicates the amygdala as a key brain structure in the experience of fear and loss aversion. The neural mechanism behind emotional influences on loss aversion is, however, unclear. To address this, w...
Article
Full-text available
The consumption of indulgent, carbohydrate-and fat-rich foods is often used as a strategy to cope with negative affect because they provide immediate self-reward. Such dietary choices, however, can severely affect people's health. One countermeasure could be to improve one's emotion regulation ability. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging...
Article
Full-text available
Envy is the painful or resentful awareness of another’s advantage combined with a desire to possess that same advantage. Recent neuroscientific research has begun to shed light on the brain regions that process the experience of envy, including regions of the prefrontal cortex involved in emotional processing and social cognition. It is still uncle...
Article
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Previous studies have shown that cognitive demands and physical exercise stimulate adult neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus and hippocampus. Recent observations in healthy humans and patients with mild cognitive impairment moreover suggest that training‐induced increases in hippocampal volume may be associated with improved memory performance. The c...
Article
Introduction: Many studies have investigated the influence of stress on decision-making. However, results are equivocal and the exact role of increased noradrenaline and cortisol after stress remains unclear. Using pharmacological manipulation, we investigated the influence of noradrenergic and glucocorticoid activity on risky decision-making in a...
Article
Full-text available
Recent empirical findings have indicated that gaze allocation plays a crucial role in simple decision behaviour. Many of these findings point towards an influence of gaze allocation onto the speed of evidence accumulation in an accumulation-to-bound decision process (resulting in generally higher choice probabilities for items that have been looked...
Article
Full-text available
The application of deep learning (DL) models to neuroimaging data poses several challenges, due to the high dimensionality, low sample size, and complex temporo-spatial dependency structure of these data. Even further, DL models often act as black boxes, impeding insight into the association of cognitive state and brain activity. To approach these...
Article
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Emotion regulation impacts the expected emotional responses to the outcomes of risky decisions via activation of cognitive control strategies. However, whether the regulation of emotional responses to preceding, incidental stimuli also impacts risk-taking in subsequent decisions is still poorly understood. In this study, we investigated the interpl...
Article
Background The promise of precision medicine for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) hinges on developing neuroscience-informed individualized interventions. Taking an important step in this direction, we investigated neuroplasticity in response to an ecologically-valid, computer-based social-cognitive training (SCOTT). Methods In an active control gro...
Article
Several studies report neurological complications such as brain injury induced by ischemia or edema following exhaustive endurance sport. We aimed to detect the frequency of acute brain lesions after a marathon race. In the prospective observational Berlin Beat of Running study, 110 experienced endurance athletes underwent 3-Tesla brain MRI exams 2...
Preprint
Full-text available
Recent empirical findings have indicated that gaze allocation plays a crucial role in simple decision behaviour. Many of these findings point towards an influence of gaze allocation onto the speed of evidence accumulation in an accumulation-to-bound decision process (resulting in generally higher choice probabilities for items that have been looked...
Article
Full-text available
How do we make simple choices such as deciding between an apple and an orange? Recent empirical evidence suggests that choice behaviour and gaze allocation are closely linked at the group level, whereby items looked at longer during the decision-making process are more likely to be chosen. However, it is unclear how variable this gaze bias effect i...
Article
Full-text available
Memory enables us to use information from our past experiences to guide new behaviours, calling for the need to integrate or form inference across multiple distinct episodic experiences. Here, we compared children (aged 9–10 years), adolescents (aged 12–13 years), and young adults (aged 19–25 years) on their ability to form integration across overl...
Article
Full-text available
Advice taking helps one to quickly acquire knowledge and make decisions. This age-comparative study (in children [8- to 10-year-olds], adolescents [13- to 15-year-olds], and adults [18- to 22-year-olds]) investigated developmental differences in how advice, experience, and exploration influence learning. The results showed that adolescents were ini...
Chapter
Die moderne affektive Neurowissenschaft entstand als interdisziplinäres Forschungsfeld in den 1990er Jahren (vgl. Davidson/Sutton 1995; Panksepp 1998) und beschäftigt sich mit den neuronalen Grundlagen von Emotionen. Dies umfasst die Wahrnehmung von Emotionen sowie ihre Verarbeitung und Kontrolle und schreibt ihnen eine zentrale Rolle in der Modula...
Article
Full-text available
Individuals tend to make riskier decisions in response to stress. The magnitude of the stress effect on decision-making under risk seems to depend on the stressor type and the decision situation. We examined the effects of physiological and combined physiological and psychosocial stress on decision-making under risk and whether risk taking differs...
Preprint
Advice taking helps one quickly acquire knowledge and make decisions. This age-comparative study (in 8-10, 13-15 and 18-22 year olds) investigated developmental differences in how advice, experience and exploration influence learning. The results showed that adolescents were initially easily swayed to follow peer advice but also switched more rapid...
Preprint
The analysis of neuroimaging data poses several strong challenges, in particular, due to its high dimensionality, its strong spatio-temporal correlation and the comparably small sample sizes of the respective datasets. To address these challenges, conventional decoding approaches such as the searchlight reduce the complexity of the decoding problem...
Article
Learning from vicarious experience is central for educational practice, but not well understood with respect to its ontogenetic development and underlying neural dynamics. In this age-comparative study we compared behavioral and electrophysiological markers of learning from vicarious and one's own experience in children (age 8-10) and young adults....
Article
Optimistic estimates about the personal future constitute one of the best-described and most-debated decision biases related to emotion. Nevertheless, it has been difficult to isolate manipulations that reduce optimistic estimates. Eliciting estimates in a foreign language is a promising candidate manipulation because foreign language use alters de...
Article
Full-text available
Decision-making biases, in particular the framing effect, can be altered in foreign language settings (foreign language effect) and following switching between languages (the language switching effect on framing). Recently, it has been suggested that the framing effect is only affected by foreign language use if the task is presented in a rich text...
Article
Full-text available
Adaptive decisions in social contexts depend on both perceptual information and social expectations or norms. These are potentially in conflict when certain choices are beneficial for an individual, but societal rules mandate a different course of action. To resolve such a conflict, the reliability of information has to be balanced against potentia...
Preprint
Full-text available
How do we make simple consumer choices (e.g., deciding between an apple, an orange, and a banana)? Recent empirical evidence suggests a close link between choice behavior and eye movements at the group level, with generally higher choice probabilities for items that were looked at longer during the decision process. However, it is unclear how varia...
Article
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Individuals make decisions under risk throughout daily life. Standard models of economic decision making typically assume that people evaluate choice options independently. There is, however, substantial evidence showing that this independence assumption is frequently violated in decision making without risk. The present study extends these finding...
Article
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Reading is not only one of the most appreciated leisure activities of the elderly but it clearly helps older people to maintain functional independence, which has a significant impact on life quality. Yet, very little is known about how aging affects the neural circuits of the processes that underlie skilled reading. Therefore, the aim of the prese...
Article
Humans tend to present themselves in a positive light to gain social approval. This behavioral trait, termed social desirability, is important for various types of social success. Surprisingly, investigation into the neural underpinnings of social desirability has been limited and focused only on interindividual differences in dopamine receptor bin...
Article
Full-text available
The reading system can be broken down into four basic subcomponents in charge of prelexical, orthographic, phonological, and lexico-semantic processes. These processes need to jointly work together to become a fluent and efficient reader. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we systematically analyzed differ- ences in neural activati...
Article
Full-text available
Older decision-makers may capitalize on their greater experiences in financial decisions and by this offset decline in cognitive abilities. However, this pattern of results should reverse in situations that place high demands on cognitive control functions. In this study, we investigated how decision conflict affects the neural mechanisms of intert...
Article
Adaptive behavior frequently depends on inference from past experience. Recent studies suggest that the underlying process of integrating related memories may depend on interaction between hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. Here, we investigated how hippocampal damage affects memory integration. Subjects with mediotemporal lesions and healthy contr...
Article
Full-text available
The reading system can be broken down into four basic subcomponents in charge of prelexical, orthographic, phonological, and lexico-semantic processes. These processes need to jointly work together to become a fluent and efficient reader. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we systematically analyzed differences in neural activation...