About
65
Publications
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Introduction
My reasearch interests are long-term memory, neurocognitive aging, Alzheimer's disease and its risk stages, and insight problem solving.
Recently, I have begun to work in the field of implementation science, i.e., how knowledge from medical research can be better implemented into routine practice, with a special focus on medical care for older adults.
On a meta-level, I'm interested in scientific career research.
I work with survey data, psychometrical data, EEG, and fMRI.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
April 2021 - present
Position
- Privatdozent
Description
- I teach in the field of Biological Psychology, Neuropsychology and Neurodidactics.
January 2023 - December 2024
Position
- Guest Researcher
Description
- I continue my research on long-term memory functions with a focus on neuro-cognitive aging and Alzheimer's disease and associated risk states.
January 2023 - December 2024
Position
- Project leader
Description
- As a project leader of a longitudinal survey on professor's careers at the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW), Hannover, I researched career paths of professors and influencing factors. Meanwhile, I continue my research on learning and memory, especially learning via insight, as a guest researcher at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), Göttingen.
Publications
Publications (65)
Prospective memory, or memory for future intentions, engages particular cortical regions. Lesion studies also implicate the thalamus, with prospective memory deterioration following thalamic stroke. Neuroimaging, anatomical and lesion studies suggest the anterior nuclei of the thalamus (ANT), in particular, are involved in episodic memory, with ele...
German academia has faced a multitude of changes over the last two decades, including new alternative academic pathways to a professorship based on the Anglo-Saxon science system, such as junior or tenure track professorship. Our study investigates the patterns of academic career trajectories to a professorship that have emerged due to these change...
Background
Environmental factors account for a considerable percentage of dementia cases. Studies in animal models have shown that environmental enrichment (EE; i.e., stimuli‐rich housing conditions) has positive effects on brain structure, including the memory system. In humans, EE as measured by the engagement in a variety of leisure activities h...
My talk for the annual conference of the European Consortium of Sociological Research, 14 September 2024, in Barcelona.
What do career paths of scientists who made it to full professorship (tenured) look like? Find out!
Besides my research on long-term memory, neuro-cognitive aging, and insight problem-solving, this is part of my "meta science" r...
In functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, episodic memory is commonly investigated with the subsequent memory paradigm in which brain activity is recorded during encoding and analyzed as a function of subsequent remembering and forgetting. Impaired episodic memory is common in individuals with or at risk for Alzheimer’s disease (AD),...
In functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, episodic memory is commonly investigated with the subsequent memory paradigm in which brain activity is recorded during encoding and analyzed as a function of subsequent remembering and forgetting. Impaired episodic memory is common in individuals with or at risk for Alzheimer's disease (AD),...
Anni Richter's and my talk from the conference "Psychologie und Gehirn" (psychology and brain) 29 May - 1 June 2024 in Hamburg, which was part of the symposium chaired by Kirsten Hilger "Cognitive brain states from a network neuroscience perspective". After the "questions" slide at the end, I added some of the slides that didn't make it into the pr...
Single-value scores reflecting the deviation from (FADE score) or similarity with (SAME score) prototypical novelty-related and memory-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activation patterns in young adults have been proposed as imaging biomarkers of healthy neurocognitive aging. Here, we tested the utility of these scores as poten...
Introduction
Prospective memory (PM), or memory for future intentions, engages particular cortical regions. Lesion studies also implicate the thalamus, with PM deterioration following thalamic stroke. Neuroimaging, anatomical, and lesion studies suggest the anterior nuclei of the thalamus (ANT) in particular are involved in episodic memory processi...
Episodic memory performance declines with increasing age, and older adults typically show reduced activation of inferior temporo-parietal cortices in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of episodic memory formation. Given the age-related cortical volume loss, it is conceivable that age-related reduction of memory-related fMRI activ...
Single-value scores reflecting the deviation from (FADE score) or similarity with (SAME score) prototypical novelty-related and memory-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activation patterns in young adults have been proposed as imaging biomarkers of healthy neurocognitive aging. Here, we tested the utility of these scores as poten...
Background: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is often preceded by stages of cognitive impairment, namely subjective cognitive decline (SCD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). While cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers are established predictors of AD, other non-invasive candidate predictors include personality traits, anxiety, and depression, among other...
Successful explicit memory encoding is associated with inferior temporal activations and medial parietal deactivations, which are attenuated in aging. Here we used Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM) of functional magnetic resonance imaging data to elucidate effective connectivity patterns between hippocampus, parahippocampal place area (PPA) and precune...
The default mode network (DMN) typically exhibits deactivations during demanding tasks compared to periods of relative rest. In functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of episodic memory encoding, increased activity in DMN regions even predicts later forgetting in young healthy adults. This association is attenuated in older adults and...
Memory-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activations show age-related differences across multiple brain regions that can be captured in summary statistics like single-value scores. Recently, we described two single-value scores reflecting deviations from prototypical whole-brain fMRI activity of young adults during novelty proces...
Episodic memory performance declines with increasing age, and older adults typically show reduced activation of inferior temporo-parietal cortices in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of episodic memory formation. Given the age-related cortical volume loss, it is likely that age-related reduction of memory-related fMRI activity c...
In episodic memory studies, memory performance is often assessed by presenting participants with previously seen old items and previously unseen new items in order to assess both, subjects' hit rates and false alarms. Sometimes, subsequent memory responses are collected as recognition-confidence ratings, e.g. on a scale ranging from "definitely new...
Successful explicit memory encoding is associated with inferior temporal activations and medial parietal deactivations, which are attenuated in aging. Here we used Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM) of functional magnetic resonance imaging data to elucidate the information flow between hippocampus, parahippocampal place area (PPA) and precuneus during e...
Objectives: The main goal of machine learning approaches to classify people into healthy, increased Alzheimer's disease (AD) risk, and AD is the identification of valuable predictors for valid classification, prediction of conversion, and automatization of the process. While biomarkers from cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) are the best-established predict...
Human cognitive abilities decline with increasing chronological age, with decreased explicit memory performance being most strongly affected. However, some older adults show "successful aging," that is, relatively preserved cognitive ability in old age. One explanation for this could be higher brain-structural integrity in these individuals. Altern...
This is my poster for 2022's annual meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping.
The default mode network (DMN) typically exhibits deactivations during demanding tasks compared to periods of relative rest. In functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of episodic memory encoding, increased activity in DMN regions even predicts la...
Objective
We assessed whether novelty-related fMRI activity in medial temporal lobe (MTL) regions and precuneus follows an inverted U-shape pattern across the clinical spectrum of increased Alzheimer disease (AD) risk as previously suggested. Specifically, we tested for potentially increased activity in individuals with higher AD risk due to subjec...
My talk from 2022's (supposedly 2020's) International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience in Helsinki, Finland. It was part of the symposium "Midline brain structures in explicit memory:
Is there a hippocampus-independent route to cortical engrams?" with Björn H. Schott and Svenja Brodt. (Sadly, Franziska Richter, who was part of the originally s...
The default mode network (DMN) typically exhibits deactivations during demanding tasks compared to periods of relative rest. In functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of episodic memory encoding, increased activity in DMN regions even predicts later forgetting in young healthy adults. This association is attenuated in older adults and...
The aim of the present study was to investigate the acquisition of ditransitive structures beyond production. We conducted an elicitation task (production) and a picture-sentence matching task measuring accuracy and response times (comprehension). We examined German five-to seven-year-old typically developing children and an adult control group. Ou...
Human cognitive abilities decline with increasing chronological age, with decreased explicit memory performance being most strongly affected. However, some older adults show "successful aging", that is, relatively preserved cognitive ability in old age. One explanation for this could be higher brain structural integrity in these individuals. Altern...
Memory-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activations show age-related differences across multiple brain regions that can be captured in summary statistics like single-value scores. Recently, we described two single-value scores reflecting deviations from prototypical whole-brain fMRI activity of young adults during novelty proces...
It has been proposed that the deployment of selective attention to perceptual and memory representations might be governed by similar cognitive processes and neural resources. However, evidence for this simple and appealing proposal remains inconclusive, which might be due to a considerable divergence in tasks and cognitive demands when comparing a...
This is one of two chapters on "A cognitive neuroscience perspective on insight as a memory process" to be published in the "Routledge International Handbook of Creative Cognition" by L. J. Ball & F. Valleé-Tourangeau (Eds.). In this chapter, we will describe cognitive and brain processes that lead to an insight. Inspired by cognitive theories, we...
This is one of two chapters on "A cognitive neuroscience perspective on insight as a memory process" to be published in the "Routledge International Handbook of Creative Cognition" by L. J. Ball & F. Valleé-Tourangeau (Eds.). While the previous chapter discussed the role of long-term memory for solving problems by insight [https://psyarxiv.com/zv4d...
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.717379.].
The last 15 years have witnessed a surge of new studies and increased efforts to better understand the elusive phenomenon of insight. This special issue reflects the expanding field of research on insight problem solving. To counter unresolved definitional and methodological challenges, a series of papers was collected that allows for a high degree...
The present pilot study investigated potential effects of early and late child bilingualism in highly proficient adult bilinguals. It has been shown that some early second language (eL2) speakers stagnate when it comes to complex linguistic phenomena and that they display subtle difficulties in adulthood. Therefore, we have chosen the complex struc...
Older adults and particularly those at risk for developing dementia typically show a decline in episodic memory performance, which has been associated with altered memory network activity detectable via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). To quantify the degree of these alterations, a score has been developed as a putative imaging biomark...
Several cognitive functions show a decline with advanced age, most prominently episodic memory. Problem-solving by insight represents a special associative form of problem-solving that has previously been shown to facilitate long-term memory formation. Recent neuroimaging evidence suggests that the encoding network involved in insight-based memory...
There are diverging operationalizations of insight in experimental research, especially when comparing behavioral and neuroimaging research. The question arises how comparable these types of insight are. Here, we set out (1) to evaluate the usefulness of the matchstick arithmetic task for investigating cognitive and neural processes underlying insi...
13 Several cognitive functions show a decline with advanced age, most prominently episodic memory. 14 Problem-solving by insight represents a special associative form of problem-solving that has 15 previously been shown to facilitate long-term memory formation. Recent neuroimaging evidence 16 suggests that the encoding network involved in insight-b...
Subsequent memory paradigms allow to identify neural correlates of successful encoding by separating brain responses as a function of memory performance during later retrieval. In functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the paradigm typically elicits activations of medial temporal lobe, prefrontal and parietal cortical structures in young, he...
Older adults and particularly those at risk for developing dementia typically show a decline in episodic memory performance, which has been associated with altered memory network activity detectable via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). To quantify the degree of these alterations, a score has been developed as a putative imaging biomark...
Neuropsychologische Studien zeigen, dass die vorschulische Förderung von mathematischen Kompetenzen sowie von kognitiven und sozio-emotionalen Basisfähigkeiten gewöhnlich positiv auf den späteren Schulerfolg, die sozio-emotionale Entwicklung und das Selbstkonzept von Kindern einwirkt. Mit dem vorliegenden Trainingsmanual stellen wir ein wissenschaf...
Neuropsychologische Studien zeigen, dass die vorschulische Förderung von mathematischen Kompetenzen sowie von kognitiven und sozio-emotionalen Basisfähigkeiten gewöhnlich positiv auf den späteren Schulerfolg, die sozio-emotionale Entwicklung und das Selbstkonzept von Kindern einwirkt. Mit dem Manual des STARK-Trainings stellen wir ein wissenschaftl...
Subsequent memory paradigms allow to identify neural correlates of successful encoding by separating brain responses as a function of memory performance during later retrieval. In functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the paradigm typically elicits activations of medial temporal lobe, prefrontal and parietal cortical structures in young, he...
Problem solving can be understood as a very active learning strategy which is also being employed in education, even though the mechanisms behind it are poorly understood (Loyens, Kirschner, & Paas, 2012). Insight in problem solving is often heralded as a moment of blinding understanding which generates a great deal of motivation (Liljedahl, 2005)....
This document, i.e., the cumulus of my publication-based habilitation, contains the an overarching summary of my research on long-term memory since my PhD thesis. It summarizes my studies on selective long-term memory retrieval and learning by insight problem solving, and draws general conclusions.
[The habilitation is the highest degree one can a...
My talk from the 21st ESCoP 2019 in Tenerife, Spain.
Sudden comprehension—or insight—during problem-solving can enhance learning, but the underlying neural processes are largely unknown. We investigated neural correlates of learning from sudden comprehension using functional magnetic resonance imaging and a verbal problem-solving task. Solutions and “solutions” to solvable and unsolvable verbal probl...
Activation of parietal cortex structures like the precuneus is commonly observed during explicit memory retrieval, but the role of parietal cortices in encoding has only recently been appreciated and is still poorly understood. Considering the importance of the precuneus in human visual attention and imagery, we aimed to assess a potential role for...
When we are confronted with a new problem, we typically try to apply strategies that have worked in the past and which usually lead closer to the solution incrementally. However, sometimes, either during a problem-solving attempt that does not seem to lead closer to the solution, or when we have given up on problem-solving for the moment, the solut...
Talk about my study published in the Journal of Problem Solving in 2016.
Experiencing insight when solving problems can improve memory formation for both the problem and its solution. The underlying neural processes involved in this kind of learning are, however, thus far insufficiently understood. Here, we conceptualized insight as the sudden understanding of a novel relationship between known stimuli that fits into ex...
Recent evidence suggests that solving problems through insight can enhance long-term memory for the problem and its solution. Previous findings have shown that generation of the solution as well as experiencing a feeling of Aha! can have a beneficial relationship to later memory. These findings lead to the question of how learning in problem-solvin...
It has been proposed that sudden insight into the solutions of problems can enhance long-term memory for those solutions. However, the nature of insight has been operationalized differently across studies. Here, we examined two main aspects of insight problem-solving—the generation of a solution and the subjective “aha!” experience—and experimental...
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...
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...
In every waking moment of our life, we are focusing our conscious processing of information on certain perceptions, ideas, feelings, and memories. In other words, we are filtering information, or selectively attending to specific occurrences in our environment (external perceptions) and to thoughts (internal perceptions) all the time. For example,...
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...
Reports that visual search is more efficient for vertically than for horizontally shaded objects suggested that search is influenced by a priori knowledge about the source of light. In this study, we examined search for targets defined by the orientation of luminance gradients and measured event-related brain potentials (ERPs). In Experiment 1, we...
