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35
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
January 2017 - December 2022
University Hospital Gießen & Marburg
Position
- Group Leader
June 2013 - December 2016
October 2011 - July 2012
Education
October 2006 - August 2012
Publications
Publications (35)
Most research in Parkinson's disease (PD) focuses on improving motor symptoms. Yet, up to 80% of patients present with non-motor symptoms that often have a large impact on patients’ quality of life. Impairment in working memory (WM), a fundamental cognitive process, is common in PD. While deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN...
Acoustic stimulation can improve motor symptoms in Parkinson’s disease (PD) and might therefore represent a potential non-invasive treatment option. Scalp electroencephalography studies in healthy subjects indicate that specifically binaural beat stimulation (BBS) in the gamma frequency range is associated with synchronized cortical oscillations at...
In many scientific fields including neuroscience, climatology or physics, complex relationships can be described most parsimoniously by non-linear mechanics. Despite their relevance, many neuroscientists still apply linear estimates in order to evaluate complex interactions. This is partially due to the lack of a comprehensive compilation of non-li...
The vagus nerve constitutes a key link between the autonomic and the central nervous system. Previous studies provide evidence for the impact of vagal activity on distinct cognitive processes including functions related to social cognition. Recent studies in animals and humans show that vagus nerve stimulation is associated with enhanced reward-see...
Bimanual coordination is impaired in Parkinson’s disease affecting patients’ ability to perform activities of daily living and to maintain independence. Conveyance of information between cortical and subcortical areas is essential for bimanual coordination and relies on the integrity of cerebral microstructure. As pathological deposition of alpha-s...
Rhythmic neural activity, so-called oscillations, plays a key role in neural information transmission, processing, and storage. Neural oscillations in distinct frequency bands are central to physiological brain function, and alterations thereof have been associated with several neurological and psychiatric disorders. The most common methods to anal...
The vagus nerve constitutes a key link between the vegetative and the central nervous system. However, the impact of vagal activity on cognitive processes is largely unknown. Recent studies in animals and humans show that vagus nerve stimulation is associated with enhanced reward-seeking and dopamine-release in the brain. Social interaction recruit...
In many scientific fields like e.g. neuroscience, climatology or physics, complex relationships can be described most parsimoniously by nonlinear mechanics. Despite their relevance, many scientists still apply linear estimates in order to evaluate complex interactions. This is partially due to the lack of a comprehensive compilation of nonlinear me...
Rhythmic neural activity, so called oscillations, play a key role for neural information transmission, processing and storage. Neural oscillations in distinct frequency bands are central to physiological brain function and alterations thereof have been associated with several neurological and psychiatric disorders. The most common methods to analys...
Timed picture naming is a common psycholinguistic paradigm. In this task, participants are asked to label visually depicted objects or actions. Naming performance can be influenced by several picture and verb characteristics which demands fully characterized normative data. In this study, we provide a first German normative data set of picture and...
Bimanual motor control declines during ageing, affecting the ability of older adults to maintain independence. An important underlying factor is cortical atrophy, particularly affecting frontal and parietal areas in older adults. As these regions and their interplay are highly involved in bimanual motor preparation, we investigated age-related conn...
Whereas the effect of vagal nerve stimulation on emotional states is well established, its effect on cognitive functions is still unclear. Recent rodent studies show that vagal activation enhances reinforcement learning and neuronal dopamine release. The influence of vagal nerve stimulation on reinforcement learning in humans is still unknown. Here...
Psychosis is the most common neuropsychiatric side-effect of dopaminergic therapy in Parkinson’s disease (PD). It is still unknown which factors determine individual proneness to psychotic symptoms. Schizotypy is a multifaceted personality trait related to psychosis-proneness and dopaminergic neurotransmission in healthy subjects. We investigated w...
Bimanual motor control declines during healthy ageing, affecting the ability of older adults to maintain independence. Age-related changes in neural dynamics of movement preparation that underlie reduced bimanual motor control, however, remain largely elusive. Here, we assessed effective connectivity within a prefrontal-premotor network of 19 young...
Despite advances in symptomatic treatment options, the pathomechanism of idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD) remains poorly understood. Animal studies from recent years suggest pathological information processing in the basal ganglia network to be responsible for major movement deficits observed in patients, which, according to the information lesi...
An important prerequisite for the analysis of spike synchrony in extracellular recordings is the extraction of single-unit activity from the multi-unit signal. To identify single units, potential spikes are separated with respect to their potential neuronal origins ('spike sorting'). However, different sorting algorithms yield inconsistent unit ass...
An important prerequisite for the analysis of spike synchrony in extracellular recordings is the extraction of single unit activity from the recorded multi unit signal. To identify single units (SUs), potential spikes are detected and separated with respect to their potential neuronal origins ('spike sorting'). However, different sorting algorithms...
Objective: To identify the significance of dopaminergic depletion in Parkinson’s disease (PD) on interhemispheric crosstalk using a complex bimanual tapping task.
Background: Dopamine deficiency in PD patients causes abnormal neuronal processing within the basal ganglia subsequently impeding functional integration of distinct areas of the cerebral...
Objective: To identify age-related changes of bimanual coordination and characterize the underlying alterations of effective connectivity within the cortical motor system.
Background: Exact signal processing within the sensorimotor system is essential for bimanual coordination. Cortical areas involved comprise supplementary motor area (SMA), later...
Bimanual coordination is impaired in Parkinson's disease (PD), affecting patients' quality of life. Besides dysfunction of the basal ganglia network, alterations of cortical oscillatory coupling, particularly between prefrontal and (pre-)motoric areas, are thought to underlie this impairment. Here, we studied 16 PD patients OFF and ON medication an...
Transfer entropy (TE) provides a generalized and model-free framework to study Wiener-Granger causality between brain regions. Because of its nonparametric character, TE can infer directed information flow also from nonlinear systems. Despite its increasing number of applications in neuroscience, not much is known regarding the influence of common...
FNDC for the Kus-model as a function of filter order for an 80 Hz causal low-pass Butterworth filter.
(TIFF)
Comparison of FP for causal and non-causal Butterworth filter using the Kus-model.
(TIFF)
Comparison of FNDC for causal and non-causal Butterworth filter using the Kus-model.
(TIFF)
FP for the Kus-model including detected indirect connection as a function of filter order for a causal 80 Hz low-pass Butterworth filter.
(TIFF)
Computation time for 100 datasets of the Kus-model each with 20 trials for different Butterworth low-pass filter applications.
Computation was done on two Dell precision tower 7910 XCTO base each with two Intel Xeon processors E5-2670 v3 (12 cores HT, 30 MB cache, 2.3 GHz) and 64 GB RAM.
(TIFF)
FNIC for the Kus-model as a function of filter order for an 80 Hz causal low-pass Butterworth filter.
(TIFF)
FP for the Kus-model as a function of filter order for an 80 Hz causal low-pass Butterworth filter.
(TIFF)
Although the clinical use of deep brain stimulation (DBS) is increasing, its basic mechanisms of action are still poorly understood. Platinum/iridium electrodes were inserted into the subthalamic nucleus of rats with unilateral 6-OHDA-induced lesions of the medial forebrain bundle. Six behavioral parameters were compared with respect to their poten...
Objective: To assess influences of dopamine deficiency on the causal interplay within the motor network during bimanual finger tapping in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients.
Background: Bimanual coordination relies on a complex orchestration of neuronal information within distinct brain areas, including supplementary motor area (SMA), lateral premo...
Bimanual finger coordination declines with age. However, relatively little is known about the neurophysiological alterations in the motor-system causing this decline. In the present study, we used 128-channel electroencephalography (EEG) to evaluate causal interactions of cortical, motor-related brain areas. Right-handed young and elderly subjects...
To identify mechanisms of physiological aging in the cerebral motor network and their effect on the causal interplay of motor related brain areas.
The aim of this study was to characterize the age related changes of effective connectivity within a cortical motor network during bimanual coordination.
To demonstrate how electrical brain activity and motor performance change during physiological aging.