Marcus J Naumer

• apl. Prof., PhD, Dipl.-Psych.
• Referent für campusübergreifende Zusammenarbeit at RPTU - Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität Kaiserslautern-Landau

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

Our ability to select relevant information from the environment is limited by the resolution of attention – i.e., the minimum size of the region that can be selected. Neural mechanisms that underlie this limit and its development are not yet understood. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was performed during an object tracking task in 7-...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

In this article, we review the paper Multisensory Temporal Integration in Autism Spectrum Disorders, by Stevenson et al. (2014). This paper illustrates the need to present different forms of stimuli in order to characterize the perceptual abilities of people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Furthermore, we will discuss their behavioral results...

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...

The car dependence of people living in contemporary cities is a major concern for policy makers, who often find it difficult to persuade people into more sustainable transport modes. By contrast, recent insights from neuroscience have shown that a broad spectrum of behaviors can become habitual and, thus, resistant to change. Here, we outline the p...

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...

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...

Rationale: Behavioral experiments have demonstrated that the sensory modality of presentation modulates drug cue reactivity. Objectives: The present study on nicotine addiction tested whether neural responses to smoking cues are modulated by the sensory modality of stimulus presentation. Methods: We measured brain activation using functional m...

Zusammenfassung: Obwohl unser Verstandnis der Rolle neurobiologischer und kognitiver Mechanismen fur die Entstehung und Aufrechterhaltung von Sucht standig zunimmt, wird dieses Wissen noch wenig in die arztliche oder psychotherapeutische Ausbildung und Praxis integriert. Dieser Artikel gibt einen Uberblick uber diejenigen neuronalen und kognitiven...

Neuroimaging studies on cue reactivity have substantially contributed to the understanding of addiction. In the majority of studies drug cues were presented in the visual modality. However, exposure to conditioned cues in real life occurs often simultaneously in more than one sensory modality. Therefore, multisensory cues should elicit cue reactivi...

Dual-coding theory (Paivio, 1986) postulates that the human mind represents objects not just with an analogous, or semantic code, but with a perceptual representation as well. Previous studies (eg, Fiebach & Friederici, 2004) indicated that the modality of this representation is not necessarily the one that triggers the representation. The human vi...

Human neuroplasticity of multisensory integration has been studied mainly in the context of natural or artificial training situations in healthy subjects. However, regular smokers also offer the opportunity to assess the impact of intensive daily multisensory interactions with smoking-related objects on the neural correlates of crossmodal object pr...

The study of Wagner et al. (J Neurosci 31: 894-898, 2011) reveals the neural correlates of spontaneously activated action representations in smokers when subjects watch movie characters smoke. We stress the importance of differentiating how these representations are activated: while the anterior intraparietal sulcus and inferior frontal gyrus are p...

Primate multisensory object perception involves distributed brain regions. To investigate the network character of these regions of the human brain, we applied data-driven group spatial independent component analysis (ICA) to a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data set acquired during a passive audio-visual (AV) experiment with common o...

Since its invention almost two decades ago functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has become the prime research methodology in human neuroscience. Its capabilities continue to evolve based on combined improvements of scanner hardware, experimental designs, and data analysis tools. Within the rapidly growing field of multisensory research the...

Oscillatory activity in the higher (gamma) frequency range in electro- or magnetoencephalogram (EEG or MEG, respectively) has been proposed as a correlate of cortical network synchronization. This chapter reviews the evidence for an involvement of gamma-band activity in multisensory integration. The relevant studies are grouped by the level at whic...

Traditionally a large proportion of perceptual research has assumed a specialization of cortical regions for the processing of stimuli in a single-sensory modality. However, perception in everyday life usually consists of inputs from multiple sensory channels. Recently the question of how the brain integrates multisensory information has become the...

The processing of visual and haptic inputs, occurring either separately or jointly, is crucial for everyday-life object recognition, and has been a focus of recent neuroimaging research. Previously, visuohaptic convergence has been mostly investigated with matching-task paradigms. However, much less is known about visuohaptic convergence in the abs...

Research on the psychological and neuronal underpinnings of addiction has concentrated mostly on affective, motivational, learning, and executive processes and the brain regions subserving these functions. In contrast, sensory and motor aspects of addiction have largely been neglected even though they may be highly relevant for the development and...

Information integration across different sensory modalities contributes to object recognition, the generation of associations and long-term memory representations. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging adaptation to investigate the presence of sensory integrative effects at cortical levels as early as nonprimary auditory and extrastri...

Traditionally a large proportion of perceptual research has assumed a specialization of cortical regions for the processing of stimuli in a single sensory modality. However, perception in everyday life usually consists of inputs from multiple sensory channels. Recently the question of how the brain integrates multisensory information has become the...

In mammals smooth retinotopic maps of the visual field are formed along the visual processing pathway whereby the left visual field is represented in the right hemisphere and vice versa. The reorganization of retinotopic maps in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) of the thalamus and early visual areas (V1-V3) is studied in a patient who was born...

In addition to reward- and craving-related processes, habitual mechanisms play an important role in addiction. While the dorsal striatum has been proposed to code for the motivational state of habitual drug-seeking actions, the neural underpinnings of the corresponding drug-taking skills and action knowledge remain poorly understood. We used functi...

To date, noninvasive neuroimaging research on multisensory perception has focused on cortical activations. In a series of elegant functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments, Beauchamp and Ro recently investigated altered cortical activations associated with acquired sound-touch synesthesia resulting from a thalamic lesion. Their findings hig...

Several regions in human temporal and frontal cortex are known to integrate visual and auditory object features. The processing of audio-visual (AV) associations in these regions has been found to be modulated by object familiarity. The aim of the present study was to explore training-induced plasticity in human cortical AV integration. We used fun...

Earlier studies reported evidence suggesting distinct category-related auditory representations for environmental sounds such as animal vocalizations and tool sounds in superior and middle temporal regions of the temporal lobe. However, the degree of selectivity of these representations remains to be determined. The present study combined functiona...

In complex natural environments, auditory and visual information often have to be processed simultaneously. Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies focused on the spatial localization of brain areas involved in audiovisual (AV) information processing, but the temporal characteristics of AV information flow in these regions rem...

By using meaningful stimuli, multisensory research has recently started to investigate the impact of stimulus content on crossmodal integration. Variations in this respect have often been termed as "semantic". In this paper we will review work related to the question for which tasks the influence of semantic factors has been found and which cortica...

The cortical integration of auditory and visual features is crucial for efficient object recognition. Previous studies have shown that audiovisual (AV) integration is affected by where and when auditory and visual features occur. However, because relatively little is known about the impact of what is integrated, we here investigated the impact of s...

Teaching in medical psychology aims at establishing an understanding of the relationships between psychological functions and bodily reactions and of the relevance of these interactions for the development and maintenance of diseases. To illustrate these relationships, a psychophysiology practical was introduced in the first semester. Students perf...

The successful integration of visual and auditory stimuli requires information about whether visual and auditory signals originate from corresponding places in the external world. Here we report crossmodal effects of spatially congruent and incongruent audio-visual (AV) stimulation. Visual and auditory stimuli were presented from one of four horizo...

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The perception of objects is a cognitive function of prime importance. In everyday life, object perception benefits from the coordinated interplay of vision, audition, and touch. The different sensory modalities provide both complementary and redundant information about objects, which may improve recognition speed and accuracy in many circumstances...

Moving dots can evoke a percept of the spatial structure of a three-dimensional object in the absence of other visual cues. This phenomenon, called structure from motion (SFM), suggests that the motion flowfield represented in the dorsal stream can form the basis of object recognition performed in the ventral stream. SFM processing is likely to con...