
Louisa KulkeUniversity of Bremen | Uni Bremen · Developmental Psychology with Educational Psychology
Louisa Kulke
Professor
Professor in Developmental Psychology with Educational Psychology at the University of Bremen
About
70
Publications
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Introduction
Prof. Dr. Louisa Kulke is a junior professor in Neurocognitive Developmental Psychology at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg. She completed her PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience at University College London and worked as a postdoc at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. Louisa does research in Neuroscience, Developmental Psychology, Affective Neuroscience and Experimental Psychology, using EEG, eye-tracking, pupillometry, emotion recognition software, VR and behavioural methods.
Publications
Publications (70)
Investigating social context effects and emotional modulation of attention in a laboratory setting is challenging. Electroencephalography (EEG) requires a controlled setting to avoid confounds, which goes against the nature of social interaction and emotional processing in real life. To bridge this gap, we developed a new paradigm to investigate th...
In psychological science, replicability—repeating a study with a new sample achieving consistent results (Parsons et al., 2022)—is critical for affirming the validity of scientific findings. Despite its importance, replication efforts are few and far between in psychological science with many attempts failing to corroborate past findings. This scar...
Do toddlers and adults engage in spontaneous Theory of Mind (ToM)? Evidence from anticipatory looking (AL) studies suggests they do. But a growing body of failed replication studies raised questions about the paradigm’s suitability, urging the need to test the robustness of AL as a spontaneous measure of ToM. In a multi-lab collaboration we examine...
Online teaching has drastically increased over recent years. Although presentation of teaching videos in 360-degree on Virtual Reality headsets was shown to be more immersive than 2D videos, it is under debate whether people learn better from immersive 360-degree videos or 2D videos. The current preregistered study aimed to compare students’ learni...
In psychological science, replicability—repeating a study with a new sampleachieving consistent results (Parsons et al., 2022)—is critical for affirming the validity of scientific findings. Despite its importance, replication efforts are few and far between in psychological science with many attempts failing to corroborate past findings. This scarc...
Infants cannot be instructed where to look; therefore, infant researchers rely on observation of their participant’s gaze to make inferences about their cognitive processes. They therefore started studying infant attention in the real world from early on. Developmental researchers were early adopters of methods combining observations of gaze and be...
People attract infants’ and adults’ gaze when presented on a computer screen. However, in live social situations, adults inhibit their gaze at strangers to avoid sending inappropriate social signals. Such inhibition of gaze has never been directly investigated in infants. The current preregistered study measured gaze and neural responses (EEG alpha...
Reproducible research and open science practices have the potential to accelerate scientific progress by allowing others to reuse research outputs, and by promoting rigorous research that is more likely to yield trustworthy results. However, these practices are uncommon in many fields, so there is a clear need for training that helps and encourages...
Measuring eye movements remotely via the participant's webcam promises to be an attractive methodological addition to in‐person eye‐tracking in the lab. However, there is a lack of systematic research comparing remote web‐based eye‐tracking with in‐lab eye‐tracking in young children. We report a multi‐lab study that compared these two measures in a...
In real-life interactions, it is crucial that humans adequately respond to others’ emotional expressions. Emotion perception so far has mainly been studied in highly controlled laboratory tasks. However, recent research suggests that attention and gaze behaviour significantly differ between watching a person on a controlled laboratory screen compar...
Human neuroscience has always been pushing the boundary of what is measurable. During the last decade, concerns about statistical power and replicability - in science in general, but also specifically in human neuroscience - have fueled an extensive debate. One important insight from this discourse is the need for larger samples, which naturally in...
Background
Prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) has been linked to severe, adverse child outcomes. However, little is known regarding subclinical outcomes of low/moderate PAE and its longitudinal consequences, especially regarding neurophysiological and neurocognitive development. A newborn biomarker of PAE, meconium ethyl glucuronide (EtG), has been sh...
Emotion research commonly uses either controlled and standardised pictures or natural video stimuli to measure participants’ reactions to emotional content. Natural stimulus materials can be beneficial; however, certain measures such as neuroscientific methods, require temporally and visually controlled stimulus material. The current study aimed to...
In everyday life, people can freely decide if and where they would like to move their attention and gaze, often influenced by physical and emotional salience of stimuli. However, many laboratory paradigms explicitly instruct participants when and how to move their eyes, leading to unnatural instructed eye-movements. The current preregistered study...
Across disciplines, researchers increasingly recognize that open science and reproducible research practices may accelerate scientific progress by allowing others to reuse research outputs and by promoting rigorous research that is more likely to yield trustworthy results. While initiatives, training programs, and funder policies encourage research...
Measuring eye movements remotely via the participant’s webcam promises to be an attractive methodological addition to in-person eye-tracking in the lab. However, there is a lack of systematic research comparing remote web-based eye-tracking with in-lab eye-tracking in young children. We report a multi-lab study that compared these two measures in a...
Human neuroscience has always been pushing the boundary of what is measurable. During the last decade, concerns about statistical power and replicability – in science in general, but also specifically in human neuroscience – have fueled an extensive debate. One important insight from this discourse is the need for larger samples, which naturally in...
People can produce facsimiles of genuine emotional displays for strategic purposes, deceiving others about their true emotions if necessary. The ability to determine if an emotional display is genuine or deceptive is vital in interpersonal communication. The scientific literature strongly points to three constructs related to emotion perception: Em...
During the COVID-19 pandemic, government-mandated protection measures such as contact restrictions and mask wearing significantly affected social interactions. In the current preregistered studies we hypothesized that such measures could influence self-reported mood in adults and in adolescents between 12 and 13 years of age, who are in a critical...
Numerous different objects are simultaneously visible in a person's visual field, competing for attention. This competition has been shown to affect eye‐movements and early neural responses toward stimuli, while the role of a stimulus' emotional meaning for mechanisms of overt attention shifts under competition is unclear. The current study combine...
Yarkoni's analysis clearly articulates a number of concerns limiting the generalizability and explanatory power of psychological findings, many of which are compounded in infancy research. ManyBabies addresses these concerns via a radically collaborative, large-scale and open approach to research that is grounded in theory-building, committed to di...
In everyday life, people can freely decide if and where they would like to move their attention and gaze, often influenced by physical and emotional salience of stimuli. However, many laboratory paradigms explicitly instruct participants when and how to move their eyes, leading to unnatural instructed eye-movements. The current preregistered study...
During the COVID-19 pandemic, government-mandated protection measures such as contact restrictions and mask wearing significantly affected social interactions. In the current preregistered study we hypothesized that such measures could influence self-reported mood and the ability to recognize emotional expressions from the eye region of faces. We f...
In everyday life, faces with emotional expressions quickly attract attention and eye movements. To study the neural mechanisms of such emotion‐driven attention by means of event‐related brain potentials (ERPs), tasks that employ covert shifts of attention are commonly used, in which participants need to inhibit natural eye movements towards stimuli...
Yarkoni’s analysis clearly articulates a number of concerns limiting the generalizability and explanatory power of psychological findings, many of which are compounded in infancy research. ManyBabies addresses these concerns via a radically collaborative, large-scale and open approach to research that is grounded in theory-building, committed to di...
There is growing awareness across the neuroscience community that the replicability of findings on the relationship between brain activity and cognitive phenomena can be improved by conducting studies with high statistical power that adhere to well-defined and standardized analysis pipelines. Inspired by efforts from the psychological sciences, and...
In everyday life, faces with emotional expressions quickly attract attention and eye-movements. To study the neural mechanisms of such emotion-driven attention by means of event-related brain potentials (ERPs), tasks that employ covert shifts of attention are commonly used, in which participants need to inhibit natural eye-movements towards stimuli...
Do children and adults engage in spontaneous Theory of Mind (ToM)? Accumulating evidence from anticipatory looking (AL) studies suggests that they do. But a growing body of studies failed to replicate these original findings. This paper presents the first step of a large-scale multi-lab collaboration dedicated to testing the robustness of spontaneo...
Recently, there has been a debate whether implicit Theory of Mind can be reliably measured using anticipatory looking tasks. Previous anticipatory looking paradigms used video stimuli to measure implicit Theory of Mind; however, numerous replications of these paradigms were unsuccessful. This lack of replications may be due to video stimuli not bei...
Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to attribute beliefs and desires to others, has been a recent focus of replication research. While some researchers found an implicit form of ToM, which could be measured with different tasks, including anticipatory looking measures, other researchers could not replicate these finding. The testing conditions may pl...
There is growing awareness across the neuroscience community that the replicability of findings on the relationship between brain activity and cognitive phenomena can be improved by conducting studies with high statistical power that adhere to well-defined and standardised analysis pipelines. Inspired by efforts from the psychological sciences, and...
Co-registration of electroencephalography (EEG) and eye movements is becoming increasingly popular, as technology advances. This new method has several advantages, including the possibility of testing non-verbal populations and infants. However, eye movements can create artefacts in EEG data. Previous methods to remove eye-movement artefacts, have...
Controlled shifts of attention between competing stimuli are crucial for effective everyday visual behaviour. While these typically involve overt shifts of fixation, many past studies used covert attention shifts in which fixation is unchanged, meaning that some response components may result from the inhibition of eye movements. In this study, the...
Human faces express emotions, informing others about their affective states. In order to measure expressions of emotion, facial Electromyography (EMG) has widely been used, requiring electrodes and technical equipment. More recently, emotion recognition software has been developed that detects emotions from video recordings of human faces. However,...
Integration of prior experience and contextual information can help to resolve perceptually ambiguous situations and might support the ability to understand other peoples’ thoughts and intentions, called Theory of Mind. We studied whether the readiness to incorporate contextual information for resolving binocular rivalry is positively associated wi...
Expectations based on prior knowledge shape perceptual experience, which might also be relevant for high-level perceptual skills such as the ability to understand other peoples’ thoughts and intentions, called Theory of Mind (ToM). We tested whether the extent to which expectations influence perception correlates with individual differences in ToM...
Emotional faces draw attention and eye-movements towards them. However, the neural mechanisms of attention have mainly been investigated during fixation, which is uncommon in everyday life where people move their eyes to shift attention to faces. Therefore, the current study combined eye-tracking and Electroencephalography (EEG) to measure neural m...
Emotional faces draw attention and eye-movements towards them. However, the neural mechanisms of attention have mainly been investigated during fixation, which is uncommon in everyday life where people move their eyes to shift attention to faces. Therefore, the current study combined eye-tracking and Electroencephalography (EEG) to measure neural m...
Recently, Theory of Mind (ToM) research has been revolutionized by new methods. Eye-tracking studies measuring subjects' looking times or anticipatory looking have suggested that implicit and automatic forms of ToM develop much earlier in ontogeny than traditionally assumed and continue to operate outside of subjects' awareness throughout the lifes...
In the last 15 years, Theory of Mind research has been revolutionized by the development of new implicit tasks. Such tasks aim at tapping children’s and adults’ uninstructed, largely automatic mental state ascription, indicated in spontaneous looking behavior when observing agents who act on the basis of false beliefs. Studies with anticipatory loo...
Additional preregistered analyses.
Additional pre-registered analyes are reported.
(DOCX)
Associated stimulus valence affects neural responses at an early processing stage. However, in the field of written language processing, it is unclear whether semantics of a word or low-level visual features affect early neural processing advantages. The current study aimed to investigate the role of semantic content on reward and loss associations...
Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to attribute mental states to agents, has usually been measured with explicit verbal tasks and found to develop slowly during the preschool years. New implicit ToM measures have lately revolutionized the field by suggesting that ToM may be present much earlier in development. However, recent replication studies of...
In comparison to neutral faces, facial expressions of emotion are known to gain attentional prioritization, mainly demonstrated by means of event-related potentials (ERPs). Recent evidence indicated that such a preferential processing can also be elicited by neutral faces when associated with increased motivational salience via reward. It remains,...
The commentary by Baillargeon, Buttelmann and Southgate raises a number of crucial issues concerning the replicability and validity of measures of false belief in infancy. Although we agree with some of their arguments, we believe that they underestimate the replication crisis in this area. In our response to their commentary, we first analyze the...
The present study aimed at investigating whether associated motivational salience causes preferential processing of inherently neutral faces similar to emotional expressions by means of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and changes of the pupil size. To this aim, neutral faces were implicitly associated with monetary outcome, while participants...
In comparison to neutral faces, facial expressions of emotion are known to elicit attentional prioritization, mainly demonstrated by means of event-related potentials (ERPs). Recent evidence indicated that such a preferential processing can also be gained by neutral faces when associated with increased motivational salience via reward. It remains,...
Recently, theory-of-mind research has been revolutionized by findings from novel implicit tasks suggesting that at least some aspects of false-belief reasoning develop earlier in ontogeny than previously assumed and operate automatically throughout adulthood. Although these findings are the empirical basis for far-reaching theories, systematic repl...
People’s faces display emotions, informing others about their affective states. In order to measure facial displays of emotion, Electromyography (EMG) has widely been used, requiring electrodes and technical equipment. More recently, emotion recognition software has been developed that detects emotions from videos. However, its validity and compara...
Associated stimulus valence affects neural responses at an early processing stage. However, in the field of written language processing, it is unclear whether semantics of a word or low-level visual features affect early neural processing advantages. The current study aimed to investigate the role of semantic content on reward and loss associations...
The present study aimed at investigating whether associated motivational salience causes preferential processing of inherently neutral faces similar to emotional expressions by means of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and changes of the pupil size. To this aim, neutral faces were implicitly associated with monetary outcome, while participants...
The ability to shift attention between relevant stimuli is crucial in everyday life and allows us to focus on relevant events. It develops during early childhood and is often impaired in clinical populations, as can be investigated in the fixation shift paradigm and the gap-overlap paradigm. Different tests use stimuli of different sizes presented...
The current dataset contains a qualitative summary of (non-)replication studies of implicit Theory of Mind paradigms. It summarizes for each paradigm, how many replications, partial replications and non-replications were identified and how many of them were published or unpublished. Furthermore, descriptive data and sample sizes are reported. The d...
Recent findings from new implicit looking time tasks indicate that children show anticipatory looking patterns suggesting false belief processing from very early on; however, systematic and independent tests of their replicability and their convergent validity are still outstanding. The current paper reports three studies from two independent resea...
In this work, we present a collection of data from three replication studies of anticipatory looking false belief tasks measuring implicit Theory of Mind. Two paradigms, by Southgate & Senju and Surian & Geraci were replicated in two independent labs. Eye-tracking data was collected and processed in line with the original procedures to allow for an...
The Fixation Shift Paradigm (FSP) measures infants' ability to shift gaze from a central fixation stimulus to a peripheral target (e.g. Hood & Atkinson, 1993: Infant Behavior and Development, 16(4), 405-422). Cortical maturation has been suggested as crucial for the developing ability to shift attention. This study investigated the development of n...
Research on neural mechanisms of attention has generally instructed subjects to direct attention covertly while maintaining a fixed gaze. This study combined simultaneous eye tracking and electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure neural attention responses during exogenous cueing in overt attention shifts (with saccadic eye movements to a target) and c...
This study measured changes in switches of attention between 1 and 9 months of age in 67 typically developing infants. Remote eye-tracking (Tobii X120) was used to measure saccadic latencies, related to switches of fixation, as a measure of shifts of attention, from a central stimulus to a peripheral visual target, measured in the Fixation Shift Pa...
This thesis used a combined methodology of on-line eye tracking and high density EEG to study neural mechanisms of attention development in infants and adults. The extensively studied Fixation Shift Paradigm (FSP) measures the ability to shift attention between two stimuli (competition) or towards one single visible stimulus (non-competition) which...
A peripheral target can either be fixated when the current central target disappears ('non-competition') or while the central target remains visible ('competition') in the Fixation Shift Paradigm, where saccadic latencies can be used as a measure of shifts of attention. Competition, which leads to much slower saccadic latencies in young infants, re...
In adults, visual form and motion activate independent networks of extrastriate areas which are roughly aligned with the ventral and dorsal streams, respectively. Using high-density steady-state ERPs, we have previously shown that the scalp topographies of infant form and motion responses are markedly different from those in adults, implying a subs...
Kuba – ein für uns exotisches Land voller geographischer und kultureller Gegensätze: Sozialismus und Villenvierteln aus den 1930er-Jahren, Badetourismus und monotonen Zuckerrohrplantagen, Salsa und Rum, gelegentlich im Einzugsbereich von zerstörerischen tropischen Hurrikans. Bilder von Schlangen vor den Läden mit rationierten Produkten und von ural...