Martin Kronbichler

• PhD
• University of Salzburg

Classical economic models are predicated on the idea that the ultimate aim of choice is to maximize utility or reward. In contrast, an alternative perspective highlights the fact that adaptive behavior requires agents' to model their environment and minimize surprise about the states they frequent. We propose that choice behavior can be more accura...

Despite advances in resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging investigations, clinicians remain with the challenge of how to implement this paradigm on an individualized basis. Here, we assessed the clinical relevance of resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging acquisitions in patients with disorders of consciousness by means o...

The intrinsic connectivity of the default mode network has been associated with the level of consciousness in patients with severe brain injury. Especially medial parietal regions are considered to be highly involved in impaired consciousness. To better understand what aspect of this intrinsic architecture is linked to consciousness, we applied spe...

It is an established finding that neuronal activity is decreased for repeated stimuli. Recent studies revealed that repetition suppression (RS) effects are altered by manipulating the probability with which stimuli are repeated. RS for faces is more pronounced when the probability of repetition is high than when it is low. This response pattern is...

Functional neuroimaging studies of pathological gambling (PG) demonstrate alterations in frontal and subcortical regions of the mesolimbic reward system. However, most investigations were performed using tasks involving reward processing or executive functions. Little is known about brain network abnormalities during task-free resting state in PG....

Level 1 visuo-spatial perspective-taking (VSPT) refers to judging what other people can and cannot see. Previous research has suggested that this form of VSPT can be achieved relatively effortlessly. Level 2 VSPT, which refers to judgments about how an object appears from different viewpoints, is conceptually more complex and linked to higher-level...

The present chapter deals with the role of the lateral ventral occipitotemporal cortex (lvOTC) in orthographic word processing. After a brief introduction, we look at current reading models, their applicability to neuroscientific findings, and the central role of orthography in normal and dyslexic reading. We describe recent findings on the organiz...

Introduction Epidemiological data on disorders of consciousness (DoC) is rare and very heterogeneous due to difficulties in case ascertainment and differences in health care pathways between countries. This study reports data on mortality and survival time for DoC patients in Salzburg, Austria. Methods All patients with DoC were registered in the...

Background and objectives: Neuroimaging studies have so far identified structural changes in individuals with juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME) when compared with controls. However, the underlying mechanisms of drug-resistant JME remain unknown. In this study, we aimed at characterizing the structural underpinnings of drug-resistant JME using MRI-...

Background: Posttraumatic stress disorder and medically unexplained pain frequently co-occur. While pain is common during traumatic events, the processing of pain during trauma and its relation to audiovisual and pain intrusions is poorly understood. Objective: Here we investigate neural activations during painful analogue trauma, focusing on areas...

Background Juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME) is associated with cortical thinning of the motor areas. The relative contribution of antiseizure medication to cortical thickness is unknown. We aimed to investigate how valproate influences the cortical morphology of JME. Methods In this cross-sectional study, individuals with JME with and without val...

Psychological reactance is a motivational state that leads people to regain threatened or lost freedoms. It is accompanied by anger and negative cognitions and causes various effects such as resistance, aggression, and increased attractiveness of the original freedom. Despite a wealth of studies exploring the causes and consequences of reactance, t...

Impaired decision‐making is often displayed by individuals suffering from gambling disorder (GD). Since there are a variety of different phenomena influencing decision‐making, we focused in this study on the effects of GD on neural and behavioural processes related to loss aversion and choice difficulty. Behavioural responses as well as brain image...

Importance: Idiopathic generalized epilepsy syndromes in are associated with cortical thinning of the premotor areas. Whether this represents an underlying disease signature, a consequence of seizure activity or is related to anti-seizure medication is unknown. Objective: To investigate valproate-related effects on cortical morphology in people wit...

Juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME) is no longer considered a benign condition and can present a significant challenge due to lack of seizure control and concomitant neuropsychological impairment. Its underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. MRI studies have described structural changes in individuals with idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE)...

The locked-in syndrome (LiS) is defined as the loss of most voluntary muscle movements with preserved cognitive abilities due to a ventral pontine lesion. However, some patients may also have severe impairment of consciousness [locked-in plus syndrome (LiPS)]. Here we aimed to explore structural differences between LiS and LiPS patients of vascular...

Diagnoses in patients with disorders of consciousness are prone to misdiagnosis; thus, research has sought approaches to increase reliability, for instance, with functional MRI. By applying a motor imagery task, patients showing covert command following despite the absence of behavioural signs of awareness can be identified as being in a cognitive...

Objective Perception and recognition of emotions are fundamental prerequisites of human life. Patients with juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME) may have emotional and behavioral impairments that might influence socially desirable interactions. We aimed to investigate perception and recognition of emotions in patients with JME by means of neuropsychol...

Sub-millimeter functional imaging has the potential to capture cortical layer–specific functional information flow within and across brain systems. Recent sequence advancements of fMRI signal readout and contrast generations resulted in wide adaptation of layer-fMRI protocols across the global ultra-high-field (UHF) neuroimaging community. However,...

Background Tinnitus affects 10 to 15% of the population, but its underlying causes are not yet fully understood. Hearing loss has been established as the most important risk factor. Ageing is also known to accompany increased prevalence; however, the risk is normally seen in context with (age-related) hearing loss. Whether ageing per se is a risk f...

Humans tend to automatically imitate others and their actions whilst also being able to control such imitative tendencies. Interference control, necessary to suppress own imitative tendencies, develops rapidly in childhood and adolescence, plateaus in adulthood, and slowly declines with advancing age. It remains to be shown though, which neural pro...

Intrinsic neural timescales (INT) reflect the duration for which brain areas store information. A posterior-anterior hierarchy of increasingly longer INT has been revealed in both typically developed individuals (TD), as well as persons diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and schizophrenia (SZ), though INT are, overall, shorter in both pa...

Background Tinnitus affects 10 to 15 percent of the population, but its underlying causes are not yet fully understood. Hearing loss has been established as the most important risk factor. Ageing is also known to accompany increased prevalence, however, the risk is normally seen as a consequence of (age-related) hearing loss. Whether ageing per se...

Background: Chocolate is one of the most frequently craved foods, and it often challenges self-regulation. These cravings may be underpinned by a neural facilitation of approach behavior toward chocolate. This preregistered study investigated the behavioral and neural correlates of such a bias using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and...

Sub-millimeter functional imaging has the potential to capture cortical layer-specific functional information flow within and across brain systems. Recent sequence advancements of fMRI signal readout and contrast generations resulted in wide adaptation of layer-fMRI protocols across the global ultra-high-field (UHF) neuroimaging community. However,...

Intrinsic neural timescales (INT) reflect the duration for which brain areas store information. A posterior – anterior hierarchy of increasingly longer INT has been revealed in both typically developed individuals (TD), as well as patients diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and schizophrenia (SZ), though INT are, overall, shorter in both...

Objective According to Panksepp's hierarchical emotion model, emotion processing relies on three functionally and neuroanatomically distinct levels. These levels comprise subcortical networks (primary level), the limbic system (secondary level), and the neocortex (tertiary level) and are suggested to serve differential emotional processing. We aime...

The excitation/inhibition (E/I) ratio has been shown to be elevated in both autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and schizophrenia (SZ), relative to neurotypical controls. However, the degree of E/I imbalance overlap and differentiation between SZ and ASD is not known. Our main objectives were therefore (1) to quantify group differences in the E/I ratio...

Recent research into the effects of hormonal contraceptives on emotion processing and brain function suggests that hormonal contraceptive users show (a) reduced accuracy in recognizing emotions compared to naturally cycling women, and (b) alterations in amygdala volume and connectivity at rest. To date, these observations have not been linked, alth...

Psychological trauma is typically accompanied by physical pain, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often co-occurs with chronic pain. Clinical reports suggest that pain after trauma may be part of a re-experiencing symptomatology. Classical conditioning can underlie visual re-experiencing since intrusions can occur as conditioned responses (C...

Background Amygdalae play a central role in emotional processing by interconnecting frontal cortex and other brain structures. Unilateral amygdala enlargement (AE) is associated with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (mTLE). In a relatively large sample of patients with mTLE and AE, we aimed to evaluate functional integration of AE in emotion processin...

Emotional egocentric bias (EEB) occurs when, due to a partial failure in self-other distinction, empathy for another's emotion is influenced by our own emotional state. Recent studies have revealed a higher EEB in children, adolescents and older adults compared to young adults, but the neural correlates of this finding are largely unknown. We asked...

We computed intrinsic neural timescales (INT) based on resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) data of healthy controls (HC) and patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder (SZ) from three independently collected samples. Five clusters showed decreased INT in SZ compared to HC in all three samples: right occipital fusiform gy...

We applied spectral dynamic causal modelling (Friston et al. in Neuroimage 94:396–407. 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.12.009 , 2014) to analyze the effective connectivity differences between the nodes of three resting state networks (i.e. default mode network, salience network and dorsal attention network) in a dataset of 31 male healthy controls (HC) a...

Flexibility is a key feature of psychological health, allowing the individual to dynamically adapt to changing environmental demands, which is impaired in many psychiatric disorders like obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). Adequately responding to varying demands requires the brain to switch between different patterns of neural activity, which are...

We computed intrinsic neural timescales (INT) based on resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) data of healthy controls (HC) and patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder (SZ) from three independently collected samples. Five clusters showed decreased INT in SZ compared to HC in all three samples: Right occipital fusiform gy...

Introduction Although there is convincing evidence for socio-cognitive impairments in schizophrenia spectrum disorder (SSD), little evidence is found for deficient moral cognition. We investigated whether patients with SSD showed altered moral judgments in a story task where the protagonist either had a neutral or malicious intention towards anothe...

Psychological trauma is typically accompanied by physical pain, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often co-occurs with chronic pain. Clinical reports suggest that pain in the aftermath of trauma may be part of a re-experiencing symptomatology. Previously, we demonstrated that classical conditioning can underlie visual re-experiencing since i...

Background: Childhood cancer survivors (Ccs) are at risk for cognitive late-effects, which might result from cortical alterations, even if cancer does not affect the brain. The study aimed to examine gray and white matter volume and its relationship to cognition. Methods: Forty-three Ccs of non-central nervous system cancers and 43 healthy controls...

Evidence accrues that readers form multiple hypotheses about upcoming words. The present study investigated the hemodynamic effects of predictive processing during natural reading by means of combining fMRI and eye movement recordings. In particular, we investigated the neural and behavioral correlates of precision-weighted prediction errors, which...

Background While considerable progress has been made in exploring the psychological, the neural, and the neurochemical dimensions of OCD separately, their interplay is still an open question, especially their changes during psychotherapy. Methods Seventeen patients were assessed at these three levels by psychological questionnaires, fMRI, and veni...

Introduction Non‐central nervous system cancer in childhood (non‐CNS CC) and its treatments pose a major threat to brain development, with implications for functional networks. Structural and functional alterations might underlie the cognitive late‐effects identified in survivors of non‐CNS CC. The present study evaluated resting‐state functional n...

The visual word form area (VWFA) in the left ventral occipito-temporal (vOT) cortex is key to fluent reading in children and adults. Diminished VWFA activation during print processing tasks is a common finding in subjects with severe reading problems. Here, we report fMRI data from a multicentre study with 140 children in primary school (7.9–12.2 y...

Sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD) is a rare fatal degenerative disease of the central nervous system. The clinical course is characterized by rapid progression of neurological and neuromuscular symptoms. The late stage with loss of consciousness is not well characterized. We report a 62-year-old male patient with sCJD with the clinical pict...

Individuals suffering from pathological gambling (PG) show impaired decision making, but it is still not clear how this impairment is related to other traits and neuroanatomical characteristics. In this study, we investigated how the influence of PG on decision making (1) is connected to different impulsivity facets and (2) how it is related to gra...

Alzheimer's disease neurodegeneration is thought to spread across anatomically and functionally connected brain regions. However, the precise sequence of spread remains ambiguous. The prevailing model used to guide in vivo human neuroimaging and non-human animal research assumes that Alzheimer's degeneration starts in the entorhinal cortices, befor...

We applied spectral dynamic causal modelling (spDCM; Friston et al., 2014) to analyze the effective connectivity differences between the nodes of three resting state networks (i.e. Default mode network/DMN, Salience network/SAN and Dorsal attention network/DAN) in a dataset of 31 healthy controls (HC) and 25 patients with schizophrenia (SZ), all ma...

Background: Deficient extinction learning has been suggested as an important mechanism involved in the etiology of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A key feature of PTSD, re-experiencing the trauma in form of intrusions, may be linked to deficient extinction learning. This link is investigated in a novel, fMRI-compatible fear conditioning pro...

Background: Language function may be reorganized in patients with malformations of cortical development (MCD). This prospective cohort study aimed in assessing language dominance in a large group of patients with MCD and epilepsy using functional MRI (fMRI). Methods: Sixty-eight patients (40 women) aged 10–73 years (median, 28.0; interquartile rang...

Emotional egocentric bias (EEB) occurs when, due to a partial failure in self-other distinction, empathy for another’s emotions is influenced by our own emotional state. Recent studies have demonstrated that this bias is higher in children, adolescents and older adults than in young adults. In the latter, overcoming emotional egocentrism has been a...

Background Growing evidence suggests that pathological processes leading to Alzheimer’s dementia occur gradually and begin to develop decades before the earliest clinical symptoms occur. The use of biomarkers has been proposed to detect in asymptomatic subjects evidence of preclinical Alzheimer’s pathologic change. Subjective cognitive complaints (...

Judgments about another person's visual perspective are impaired when the self-perspective is inconsistent with the other-perspective. This is a robust finding in healthy samples as well as in schizophrenia (SZ). Studies show evidence for the existence of a reverse effect, where an inconsistent other-perspective impairs the self-perspective. Such s...

The diagnosis and prognosis of patients with severe chronic disorders of consciousness are still challenging issues and a high rate of misdiagnosis is evident. Hence, new tools are needed for an accurate diagnosis, which will also have an impact on the prognosis. In recent years, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) has been gaining more an...

We applied spectral dynamic causal modelling (spDCM; Friston et al., 2014) to analyze the effective connectivity differences between (a) large scale resting state networks (RSNs) of 25 patients with schizophrenia (SZ) and 31 healthy controls (HC), and (b) individual network nodes (i.e. default mode network/DMN including the left and right hippocamp...

Juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME) is the most common idiopathic generalized epilepsy. Disease onset is typically in puberty and poor social adjustment and behavioral disturbances, which resemble frontal lobe dysfunction, are often observed. In recent advanced brain imaging studies on JME patients, emotional and behavioral problems have been associa...

Alzheimer's disease neuropathology is thought to spread across anatomically and functionally connected brain regions. However, the precise sequence of spread remains ambiguous. The prevailing model posits that Alzheimer's neurodegeneration starts in the entorhinal cortices, before spreading to temporoparietal cortex. Challenging this model, we earl...

Successful behaviour depends on the right balance between maximising reward and soliciting information about the world. Here, we show how different types of information-gain emerge when casting behaviour as surprise minimisation. We present two distinct mechanisms for goal-directed exploration that express separable profiles of active sampling to r...

Objective: fMRI scans of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) consistently show a hyperactivity of the insular cortex, a region responsible for disgust-processing, when confronted with symptom-triggering stimuli. This asks for an investigation of the role of disgust and the insula in OCD patients. Methods: Seventeen inpatients with OCD...

Background: Pathological peritraumatic encoding is proposed as a proximal risk factor for the development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), with trauma-analog studies linking increased neural processing of trauma films to intrusive trauma recollections, a core symptom of PTSD. Cumulative lifetime adversity is proposed as a more distal risk...

Neurocognitive studies of visual word recognition have provided information about brain activity correlated with orthographic processing. Some of these studies related the orthographic neighborhood density of letter strings to the amount of hypothetical global lexical activity (GLA) in the brain as simulated by computational models of word recognit...

For patients with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), whose triggers are highly idiosyncratic, individual stimulus material has been used in several fMRI studies. This study aims at comparing individual to standardized picture sets and at investigating a possible overlap of the former with the self-referential neuronal network. During fMRI-scannin...

Our environment abounds in objects of different orientations When we want to interact with these objects, e g by grasping, we can do so provided we accurately perceive their orientation The orientation of an object can be characterized along three independent spatial axes: x (or slant), y (or tilt), and z (or depth) How does the human brain achieve...

Successful behaviour depends on the right balance between maximising reward and soliciting information about the world. Here, we show how different types of information-gain emerge when casting behaviour as surprise minimisation. We present two distinct mechanisms for goal-directed exploration that express separable profiles of active sampling to r...

Several fMRI and EEG/MEG studies show that repetition suppression (RS) effects are stronger when a stimulus repetition is expected compared to when a stimulus repetition is less expected. To date, the prevalent way to assess the influence of expectations on RS is via immediate stimulus repetition designs, that is, no intervening stimuli appear betw...

There is an ongoing debate about the involvement of Theory of Mind (ToM) processes in Visual Perspective Taking (VPT). In an fMRI study (Schurz et al., 2015), we borrowed the positive features from a novel VPT task - which is widely used in behavioral research - to study previously overlooked experimental factors in neuroimaging studies. However, a...

Clinical case: We report on a 19-year old male patient who is recovering from near-drowning. The patient was admitted for re-evaluation in a Minimally Conscious State. Method: A regular functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging was not possible due to complex motor tics of the patient with sudden flexion and extension movements of arms and legs as w...

Purpose of Review Developmental dyslexia is characterized by an impaired acquisition of fluent and skilled reading ability. Numerous studies have explored the neural correlates of this neurodevelopmental disorder, with most classic accounts strongly focussing on left temporoparietal regions. We will review recent findings from structural and functi...

Face processing is regularly found to be impaired in schizophrenia (SZ), thus suggesting that social malfunctioning might be caused by dysfunctional face processing. Most studies focused on emotional face processes, whereas non-emotional face processing received less attention. While current reports on abnormal face processing in SZ are mixed, exam...

Empathy is essential for successful social interactions and relationships. The neural underpinnings of empathy have predominantly been studied in the young adult population, while little is known about how they evolve across the life-span. In the present study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate age-related differen...

Introduction In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we compared task performance together with brain activation in a visuospatial task (VST) and a letter detection task (LDT) between longtime action video gamers (N = 14) and nongamers (N = 14) in order to investigate possible effects of gaming on cognitive and brain abilities....

Presentation and proposal of 2-point and multi-point geostatistical workflows for MS white matter lesion pattern analysis

Background Although established as a general notion in society, there is no solid scientific foundation for the existence of sex-differences in multitasking. Reaction time and accuracy in dual task conditions have an inverse relationship relative to single task, independently from sex. While a more disseminated network, parallel to decreasing accur...

Minimal raw data of the study for all participants. (XLSX)

Social cognition abilities are severely impaired in schizophrenia (SZ). The current meta-analysis used foci of 21 individual studies on functional abnormalities in the schizophrenic brain in order to identify regions that reveal convergent under- or over-activation during theory of mind (TOM) tasks. Studies were included in the analyses when contra...

Current neurocognitive research suggests that the efficiency of visual word recognition rests on abstract memory representations of written letters and words stored in the visual word form area (VWFA) in the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex. These representations are assumed to be invariant to visual characteristics such as font and case. In th...

Supporting Information

Word length, frequency, and predictability count among the most influential variables during reading. Their effects are well-documented in eye movement studies, but pertinent evidence from neuroimaging primarily stem from single-word presentations. We investigated the effects of these variables during reading of whole sentences with simultaneous ey...

Menstrual cycle dependent changes have been reported for a variety of functions, including cognition, attention, emotion, inhibition and perception. For several of these functions an effect of hormonal contraceptives has also been discussed. Cognitive, attentional, emotional, inhibitory and perceptual functions have been linked to distinct intrinsi...