Léon Franzen

Léon Franzen
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Léon verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
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Léon verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
University of Lübeck · Klinik für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie

Doctor of Psychology
Research interests: perceptual decision-making, reading, dyslexia, computational psychiatry, psychosis, schizophrenia

About

33
Publications
5,990
Reads
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167
Citations
Introduction
I am a cognitive neuroscientist (postdoc – clinician scientist) working on neurally informed modelling of visual and auditory perceptual decisions in clinical (schizophrenia), subclinical (dyslexia, schizotypy), and consumer psychology settings. Techniques I use include EEG, eye-tracking, pupillometry, galvanic skin response, response times, and behavioral modelling. I am collaborating with the Universities of Glasgow, Stirling, Basel, and Leeds, McGill Uni and Concordia University Montreal
Additional affiliations
October 2015 - December 2018
University of Glasgow
Position
  • PhD Student
Description
  • Philiastides Lab for Multimodal Neuroimaging
March 2021 - December 2022
University of Lübeck
Position
  • PostDoc Position
Description
  • Obleser Lab working on computational models of supramodal perceptual decisions
January 2019 - February 2021
Concordia University
Position
  • PostDoc Position
Description
  • Collaborative project with the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University

Publications

Publications (33)
Preprint
Full-text available
Individuals with dyslexia struggle at explaining what it is like to have dyslexia and how they perceive letters and words differently. This led the designer Daniel Britton to create a font that aims to simulate the perceptual experience of how effortful reading can be for individuals with dyslexia (http://danielbritton.info/dyslexia). This font rem...
Article
Full-text available
Despite recent progress in understanding multisensory decision-making, a conclusive mechanistic account of how the brain translates the relevant evidence into a decision is lacking. Specifically, it remains unclear whether perceptual improvements during rapid multisensory decisions are best explained by sensory (i.e., ‘Early’) processing benefits o...
Article
Full-text available
Individuals with dyslexia present with reading-related deficits including inaccurate and/or less fluent word recognition and poor decoding abilities. Slow reading speed and worse text comprehension can occur as secondary consequences of these deficits. Reports of visual symptoms such as atypical eye movements during reading gave rise to a search fo...
Article
Full-text available
Cognitive psychology has a long history of using physiological measures, such as pupillometry. However, their susceptibility to confounds introduced by stimulus properties, such as color and luminance, has limited their application. Pupil size measurements, in particular, require sophisticated experimental designs to dissociate relatively small cha...
Article
Full-text available
The combination of a replication crisis, the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and recent technological advances, have accelerated the ongoing transition of research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience to the online realm. When participants cannot be tested in-person, data of acceptable quality can still be collected online. While online resea...
Article
Full-text available
Dyslexia is a language‐based neurobiological and developmental learning disability marked by inaccurate and disfluent word recognition, poor decoding, and difficulty spelling. Individuals can be diagnosed with and experience symptoms of dyslexia throughout their lifespan. Screening tools such as the Dyslexia Adult Checklist allow individuals to sel...
Preprint
Full-text available
Mental health research increasingly focuses on the relationship between psychiatric symptoms and observable manifestations of the face and body. In recent studies, psychiatric patients have shown distinct patterns in movement, posture and facial expressions, suggesting these elements could enhance clinical diagnostics. The analysis of the facial ex...
Preprint
Full-text available
In our daily lives, we frequently encounter non-linguistic visual content that we must remember in a spatial context. Individuals with dyslexia are known to experience difficulty with linguistic content and show impairments in cognitive functioning. Recently researchers have highlighted that vision and executive functioning may play a role in expla...
Preprint
Dyslexia is a language-based neurobiological and developmental learning disability marked by inaccurate and disfluent word recognition, poor decoding, and difficulty spelling. Individuals can be diagnosed with and experience symptoms of dyslexia throughout their lifespan. Screening tools such as the Dyslexia Adult Checklist allow individuals to sel...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction In the inherently noisy real world, we can rarely have full certainty about what we have just seen or heard. Thus, making a perceptual decision on sensory information, and simultaneously tracking our varying levels of certainty in these decisions (i.e., metacognitive abilities) are crucial components of everyday life. Hallucinations, s...
Article
Full-text available
The basal forebrain cholinergic nuclei (BFCN) provide the main cholinergic input to prefrontal cortices, the hippocampi, and amygdala. These structures are highly relevant for the regulation and maintenance of many cognitive functions, such as attention and memory. In vivo neuroimaging studies reported alterations of the cholinergic system in psych...
Article
Individuals with dyslexia struggle at explaining what it is like to have dyslexia and how they perceive letters and words differently. This led the designer Daniel Britton to create a font that aims to simulate the perceptual experience of how effortful reading can be for individuals with dyslexia (http://danielbritton.info/dyslexia). This font rem...
Preprint
Full-text available
The combination of a replication crisis, global COVID-19 pandemic, and recent technological advances have accelerated the on-going transition of research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience to the online realm. When participants cannot be tested in-person, data of acceptable quality can still be collected online. While online research offers m...
Preprint
Full-text available
Cognitive psychology has a long history of using physiological measures, such as pupillometry. However, their susceptibility to confounds introduced by stimulus properties, such as color and luminance, has limited their application. Pupil size measurements, in particular, require sophisticated experimental designs to dissociate relatively small cha...
Method
Full-text available
This document is a synopsis of information collected in person and online from the contributors shown on the title page, which was partly presented in oral form at the Concordia Cognition Event (Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Montréal) in December 2020. Note, contributors all have provided conceptual input along the way (i.e., shar...
Article
Full-text available
The discipline of visual marketing increasingly relies on eye movements—specifically using area of interest (AOI) analyses—to better understand consumers’ processing of visual stimuli in viewing, searching, and decision-making tasks. These analyses often focus on the distribution of visual attention in space and product search paradigms. The effect...
Preprint
Full-text available
Individuals with dyslexia present with reading-related deficits including slow reading speed, and worse text comprehension and word encoding. Reports of visual symptoms such as atypical eye movements during reading gave rise to a search for these deficits’ underlying mechanisms. This study sought to replicate established behavioural deficits in rea...
Preprint
Full-text available
Good reading comprehension is indispensable in many situations including contract-based transactions that have become so prevalent in our everyday lives. People with dyslexia often exhibit impairments in this important cognitive process. Although the effects of italics — a commonly used style for highlighting important content in a range of documen...
Presentation
This presentation discusses preliminary results of a recent eye-tracking study on the effects of OpenDyslexic will be presented and discussed. This study, run in collaboration with the Concordia Vision Labs in Montréal, investigated the eye movements, heart rate variability and text comprehension of university students with and without dyslexia. Pa...
Presentation
This presentation discussed results from two recent studies on adult dyslexics’ perceptual decision-making with respect to differences in font or font style. The first studies used EEG to investigate the effects of italic font on legal lexical decision-making and Event Related Potentials. The second study, run in collaboration with the Concordia Vi...
Poster
This poster presented preliminary results from an EEG study on lexical decision-making by adult dyslexics in the context of legal language. At this stage we were able to include 30 participants in the preliminary results presented..
Poster
This poster presented preliminary results from an EEG study on lexical decision-making by adult dyslexics in the context of legal language. At this stage we were able to include 30 participants in the preliminary results presented.
Poster
Here we presented our behavioural data on a decision-making study with regard to purchase decisions of various multivitamin juices. These products were solely created for this study. Participants had to make a two step decision.. The first decision was based on product details and buying recommendation outlined in a brochure, whereas participants c...

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