Jochen Kaiser

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main ·  Institut für Medizinische Psychologie

During the last 30 years, a large number of behavioral studies have investigated the effect of simultaneous exercise on cognitive functions. The heterogeneity of the results has been attributed to different parameters, such as intensity or modality of physical activity, and the investigated cognitive processes. More recent methodological improvemen...

Working memory enables the temporary storage of relevant information in the service of behavior. Neuroimaging studies have suggested that sensory cortex is involved in maintaining contents in working memory. This raised the question of how sensory regions maintain memory representations during the exposure to distracting stimuli. Multivariate patte...

IntroductionAuditory-motor interactions can support the preparation for expected sensory input. We investigated the periodic modulation of beta activity in the electroencephalogram to assess the role of active auditory-motor synchronization. Pre-stimulus beta activity (13–30 Hz) has been interpreted as a neural signature of the preparation for expe...

The action perspective on working memory suggests that memory representations are coded according to their specific temporal and behavioral task demands. This stands in contrast to theories that assume representations are stored in a task-agnostic format within a “common workspace”. Here, we tested whether visual items that are memorized for differ...

Financial incentives are commonly used to motivate behaviors. However, there is also evidence that incentives can impede the behavior they are supposed to foster, for example, documented by a decrease in blood donations if a financial incentive is offered. Based on these findings, previous studies assumed that prosocial motivation is shaped by ince...

Background Standardized neuropsychological testing serves to quantify cognitive impairment in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. However, the exact mechanism underlying the translation of cognitive dysfunction into difficulties in everyday tasks has remained unclear. To answer this question, we tested if MS patients with intact vs. impaired informat...

Motives motivate human behavior. Most behaviors are driven by more than one motive, yet it is unclear how different motives interact and how such motive combinations affect the neural computation of the behaviors they drive. To answer this question, we induced two prosocial motives simultaneously (multi-motive condition) and separately (single moti...

Aging is accompanied by unisensory decline. To compensate for this, two complementary strategies are potentially relied upon increasingly: first, older adults integrate more information from different sensory organs.Second, according to the predictive coding (PC) model, we form “templates” (internal models or “priors”) of the environment through ou...

Multivariate analyses of hemodynamic signals serve to identify the storage of specific stimulus contents in working memory (WM). Representations of visual stimuli have been demonstrated both in sensory regions and in higher cortical areas. While previous research has typically focused on the WM maintenance of a single content feature, it remains un...

Financial incentives are commonly used to motivate behaviours. There is also evidence that incentives can decline the behaviour they are supposed to foster, for example, documented by a decrease in blood donations if a financial incentive is offered. Based on these findings, previous studies assumed that prosocial motivation is shaped by incentives...

Objective Research on visual working memory has shown that individual stimulus features are processed in both specialized sensory regions and higher cortical areas. Much less evidence exists for auditory working memory. Here, a main distinction has been proposed between the processing of spatial and non-spatial sound features. Our aim was to examin...

Attention selects relevant information regardless of whether it is physically present or internally stored in working memory. Perceptual research has shown that attentional selection of external information is better conceived as rhythmic prioritization than as stable allocation. Here we tested this principle using information processing of interna...

The article “Psychosocial distress in acute cancer patients assessed with an expert rating scale”.

In Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), impaired response inhibition and lack of adaptation are hypothesized to underlie core ASD symptoms, such as social communication and repetitive, stereotyped behavior. Thus, the aim of the present study was to compare neural correlates of inhibition, post-error adaptation, and reaction time variability in ASD and...

Serial dependence is thought to promote perceptual stability by compensating for small changes of an object’s appearance across memory episodes. So far, it has been studied in situations that comprised only a single object. The question of how we selectively create temporal stability of several objects remains unsolved. In a memory task, objects ca...

Zusammenfassung Ziel der Studie Durch den Masterplan Medizinstudium 2020 und die Entwicklung des Nationalen Kompetenzbasierten Lernzielkatalogs Medizin (NKLM) wurden bedeutsame Veränderungen in der universitären Medizin angestoßen. Ziel der Studie war eine systematische Erfassung des Standes und der Perspektiven der Fächer Medizinische Psychologie...

Motives motivate human behavior. Most behaviors are driven by more than one motive, yet it is unclear how different motives interact and how such motive combinations affect the neural computation of the behaviors they drive. To answer this question, we induced two prosocial motives simultaneously (multi-motive condition) and separately (single moti...

Objective: Many cancer patients complain about cognitive dysfunction. While cognitive deficits have been attributed to the side effects of chemotherapy, there is evidence for impairment at disease onset, prior to cancer-directed therapy. Further debated issues concern the relationship between self-reported complaints and objective test performance...

Multisensory integration strongly depends on the temporal proximity between two inputs. In the audio-visual domain, stimulus pairs with delays up to a few hundred milliseconds can be perceived as simultaneous and integrated into a unified percept. Previous research has shown that the size of this temporal window of integration can be narrowed by fe...

The storage mechanisms of working memory are the matter of an ongoing debate. The sensory recruitment hypothesis states that memory maintenance and perceptual encoding rely on the same neural substrate. This suggests that the same cortical mechanisms that shape object perception also apply to maintained memory content. We tested this prediction usi...

Working memory enables the storage of few items for a short period of time. Previous research has shown that items in working memory cannot be accessed equally well, indicating that they are held in at least two different states with different capacity limitations. However, it is unclear whether differences between states are due to limitations of...

Visual perception operates in an object-based manner, by integrating associated features via attention. Working memory allows a flexible access to a limited number of currently relevant objects, even when they are occluded or physically no longer present. Recently, it has been shown that we compensate for small changes of an object's feature over m...

The binned scatter plots for the independent variable “SiFi SOA 500 ms” and the dependent variables “number of failed tests” and “z global score” from the two regression models are shown in the upper row. The lower row of scatter plots demonstrates the partial regression plots for the two significant predictors “years of education” and “SiFi SOA 50...

Objective: To determine whether the performance of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients in the sound-induced flash illusion (SiFi), a multisensory perceptual illusion, would reflect their cognitive impairment. Methods: We performed the SiFi task as well as an extensive neuropsychological testing in 95 subjects [39 patients with relapse-remitting MS (RR...

The storage mechanisms of working memory are the matter of an ongoing debate. The sensory recruitment hypothesis states that memory maintenance and perceptual encoding rely on the same neural substrate. This suggests that the same cortical mechanisms that shape object perception also apply to maintained memory content. We tested this prediction usi...

Working memory enables the storage of few items for a short period of time. Previous research has shown that items in working memory cannot be accessed equally well, indicating that they are held in at least two different states with different capacity limitations. However, it is unclear whether differences between states are due to limitations of...

Stimulus representations in working memory depend on memory traces of past stimuli both from previous trials and from the current trial. However, it is unclear whether the same or different mechanisms underlie this serial dependence across and within trials. We directly contrasted estimates of bias for pairs of immediately successive stimuli across...

Serial dependence refers to a systematic bias that attracts present towards recent visual inputs. It has been assumed to increase the stability of perception, as most recent and attended input has the strongest bias. Recent studies have suggested that serial dependence is a mnemonic rather than a purely perceptual phenomenon, as it increases with l...

Attention samples spatial positions, visual objects or auditory streams rhythmically. This has been reported for tasks where the attended information was perceptually present. Here we tested whether attentional sampling also applies to internal representations held in working memory. Participants memorized four spatial positions that formed the end...

Rhythmic auditory stimulation (RAS) may compensate dysfunctions of the basal ganglia (BG), involved with intrinsic evaluation of temporal intervals and action initiation or continuation. In the cognitive domain, RAS containing periodically presented tones facilitates young healthy participants' attention allocation to anticipated time points, indic...

The neurophysiological underpinnings of the nonsocial symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) which include sensory and perceptual atypicalities remain poorly understood. Well-known accounts of less dominant top-down influences and more dominant bottom-up processes compete to explain these characteristics. These accounts have been recently embed...

Addiction is a significant health burden with a major impact on society. Its neural underpinnings have been extensively studied in animal experiments and human neuroimaging studies, which have demonstrated that during addiction various reorganizational processes hijack the reward and habit systems. Thus, subcortical and cortical brain regions becom...

Recent studies have shown that moving in synchrony with auditory stimuli boosts attention allocation and verbal learning. Furthermore rhythmic tones are processed more efficiently than temporally random tones ('timing effect'), and this effect is increased when participants actively synchronize their motor performance with the rhythm of the tones,...

Working memory (WM) enables a rapid access to a limited number of items that are no longer physically present. WM studies usually involve the encoding and retention of multiple items, while probing a single item only. Hence, little is known about how well multiple items can be reported from WM. Here we asked participants to successively report each...

Aging is accompanied by unisensory decline; but to compensate for this, two complementary strategies are potentially relied upon increasingly: first, older adults integrate more information from different sensory organs. Second, according to predictive coding (PC) we form ‘templates’ (internal models or ‘priors’) of the environment through our expe...

Supplementary tables

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), an important neural growth factor, has gained growing interest in neuroscience, but many influencing physiological and analytical aspects still remain unclear. In this study we assessed the impact of storage time at room temperature, repeated freeze/thaw cycles, and storage at −80 °C up to 6 months on serum...

In the later stages of addiction, automatized processes play a prominent role in guiding drug-seeking and drug-taking behavior. However, little is known about the neural correlates of automatized drug-taking skills and drug-related action knowledge in humans. We employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while smokers and non-smokers per...

Previous magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies have revealed gamma-band activity at sensors over parietal and fronto-temporal cortex during the delay phase of auditory spatial and non-spatial match-to-sample tasks, respectively. While this activity was interpreted as reflecting the memory maintenance of sound features, we noted that task-related act...

Current models of working memory (WM) assume that mnemonic representations of individual items are stored independently of one another. Recent studies, however, have indicated that WM representations interact, leading to systematic distortions along their feature dimension. In a series of experiments we found that several aspects of the encoding si...

Recently, a growing number of studies have examined the role of multisensory temporal integration in people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Some studies have used temporal order judgments or simultaneity judgments to examine the temporal binding window, while others have employed multisensory illusions, such as the sound-induced flash illusion...

In animals, physical activity has been shown to induce functional and structural changes especially in the hippocampus and to improve memory, probably by upregulating the release of neurotrophic factors. In humans, results on the effect of acute exercise on memory are inconsistent so far. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to assess the ef...

Previous studies have shown that the effect of temporal predictability of presented stimuli on attention allocation is enhanced by auditory-motor synchronization (AMS). The present P300 event-related potential study (N=20) investigated whether this enhancement depends on the process of actively synchronizing one's motor output with the acoustic inp...

During the course of addiction habitual mechanisms which reflect robust stimulus-response associations gain the control over drug-taking. It has been suggested that the performance of habitual behavior is guided by automatized action schemata, a constellation of stimuli-bound specific skills which ensure the efficient initiation and execution of dr...

Decline in cognitive function, such as memory impairment, is one of the most commonly reported symptoms in cancer patients. Importantly, cognitive impairment is not restricted to patients treated for brain tumors, but also frequently present in patients treated for tumors outside the nervous system. Recent discoveries from preclinical and translati...

Addional analyses including only women taking contraceptives and men.

Processing of auditory spatial and non-spatial information in working memory has been shown to rely on separate cortical systems. While previous studies have demonstrated differences in spatial versus non-spatial processing from the encoding of to-be-remembered stimuli onwards, here we investigated whether such differences would be detectable alrea...

Cannabinoids receive increasing interest as analgesic treatments. However, the clinical use of Δ(9)-tetrahydrocannabinol (Δ(9)-THC) has progressed with justified caution which also owes to the incomplete mechanistic understanding of its analgesic effects, in particular its interference with the processing of sensory or affective components of pain....

Cancer therapies can be associated with significant central nervous system (CNS) toxicity. While radiation-induced brain damage has been long recognized both in pediatric and adult cancer patients, CNS toxicity from chemotherapy has only recently been acknowledged. Clinical studies suggest that the most frequent neurotoxic adverse effects associate...

Working memory denotes the ability to retain stimuli in mind that are no longer physically present and to perform mental operations on them. Electro- and magnetoencephalography allow investigating the short-term maintenance of acoustic stimuli at a high temporal resolution. Studies investigating working memory for non-spatial and spatial auditory i...

Visual attention enables observers to select behaviorally relevant information based on spatial locations, features, or objects. Attentional selection is not limited to physically present visual information, but can also operate on internal representations maintained in working memory (WM) in service of higher-order cognition. However, only little...

Previous studies investigating mild cognitive impairment (MCI) have focused primarily on cognitive, memory, attention, and executive function deficits. There has been relatively little research on the perceptual deficits people with MCI may exhibit. This is surprising given that it has been suggested that sensory and cognitive functions share a com...

Cancer survivors treated with chemotherapy frequently complain about impairment of cognitive functions including attention and memory. While the contribution of factors like psychological distress, anxiety or fatigue to this “chemobrain” syndrome has been discussed, studies in rodents have demonstrated the toxicity of various chemotherapeutic subst...

Attending to a single stimulus in a complex multisensory environment requires the ability to select relevant information while ignoring distracting input. The underlying mechanism and involved neuronal levels of this attentional gain control are still a matter of debate. Here, we investigated the influence of intermodal attention on different level...

Moderate physical activity improves various cognitive functions, particularly when it is applied simultaneously to the cognitive task. In two psychoneuroendocrinological within-subject experiments, we investigated whether very low-intensity motor activity, i.e. walking, during foreign-language vocabulary encoding improves subsequent recall compared...

The most common form of synaesthesia is grapheme–colour synaesthesia. However, rarer forms of synaesthesia also exist, such as word–gustatory and olfactory–gustatory synaesthesia, whereby a word or smell will induce a specific. In this study we describe a single individual (LJ) who experiences a concurrent olfactory stimulus when presented with con...

To assess possible structural changes in cortical anatomy that occur in the course of literacy acquisition, children were investigated twice in their first two years of elementary school. Tensor-based morphometry revealed a negative association between longitudinal cortical volume development and reading proficiency in areas previously associated w...

Cancer survivors frequently experience cognitive deficits following chemotherapy. The most commonly affected functions include memory, attention and executive control. The present paper reviews animal research and clinical studies including event-related potential and neuroimaging investigations of chemotherapy-related changes of brain structure an...

Neural systems involved in the processing of written language have been identified by a number of functional imaging studies. Structural changes in cortical anatomy that occur in the course of literacy acquisition, however, remain largely unknown. Here, we follow elementary school children over their first 2 years of formal reading instruction and...

Encoding and maintenance of information in visual working memory have been extensively studied, highlighting the crucial and capacity-limiting role of fronto-parietal regions. In contrast, the neural basis of recognition in visual working memory has remained largely unspecified. Cognitive models suggest that recognition relies on a matching process...

Human neuroimaging studies suggest that neural cue reactivity is strongly associated with, indices of drug use, including addiction severity and treatment success. However, little is known about, factors that modulate cue reactivity. The goal of this review, in which we survey published fMRI and, PET studies on drug cue reactivity in cocaine, alcoh...

Temporal predictability of auditory events induces larger P300 amplitudes and shorter P300 latencies compared to stimulus presentation with variable onset asynchronies. This suggests that periodic stimuli lead to neuronal entrainment resulting in a more efficient allocation of attentional resources. Simultaneous synchronized motor activity should f...

Acute physical activity has been repeatedly shown to improve various cognitive functions. However, there have been no investigations comparing the effects of exercise during verbal encoding versus exercise prior to encoding on long-term memory performance. In this current psychoneuroendocrinological study we aim to test whether light to moderate er...

The processing of audiovisual information is an important aspect of object recognition since many objects are characterized by visual and auditory features. The images and sounds of everyday life objects are often associated with positive or negative emotions. There is evidence that emotional valence modulates the neural processing of object images...

The McGurk-effect (McGurk and MacDonald, 1976) is a robust illusion which is broadly studied in the context of audiovisual integration. In the illusion, auditory speech perception is modified by discrepant visual lip-movements when presented synchronously, leading to a third, not physically present percept. There is an ongoing debate as to whether...