Sebastian Jentschke

University of Bergen | UiB · Department of Psychosocial Science

The human brain extracts statistical regularities from the surrounding environment in a process called statistical learning. Behavioural evidence suggests that developmental dyslexia affects statistical learning. However, surprisingly few studies have assessed how developmental dyslexia affects the neural processing underlying this type of learning...

The human brain extracts statistical regularities from the surrounding environment in a process referred to as statistical learning. Recent behavioural evidence suggests that developmental dyslexia affects statistical learning. However, surprisingly few neurophysiological studies have assessed how developmental dyslexia affects the neural processin...

Background: Recurrent Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is one of the most disabling mental disorders in modern society. Prior research has shown that self-compassion protects against ruminative tendencies, a key feature of recurrent MDD. In addition, self-compassion has been found to be positively related to higher psychophysiological flexibility (i...

The capability to establish accurate predictions is an integral part of learning. Whether predictions about different dimensions of a stimulus interact with each other, and whether such an interaction affects learning, has remained elusive. We conducted a statistical learning study with EEG (electroencephalography), where a stream of consecutive so...

The purpose of the present note is to draw attention to the potential role of a recently discovered visual illusion in creating traffic accidents. The illusion consists in a compelling and immediate experience that the space behind an occluding object in the foreground is empty. Although the illusion refers to a region of space, which is invisible...

Neurobiological models of emotion focus traditionally on limbic/paralimbic regions as neural substrates of emotion generation, and insular cortex (in conjunction with isocortical anterior cingulate cortex, ACC) as the neural substrate of feelings. An emerging view, however, highlights the importance of isocortical regions beyond insula and ACC for...

Acute sentinel hypoxia-ischaemia in neonates can target the hippocampus, mammillary bodies, thalamus, and the basal ganglia. Our previous work with paediatric patients with a history of hypoxia-ischaemia has revealed hippocampal and diencephalic damage that impacts cognitive memory. However, the structural and functional status of other brain regio...

Understanding the association between autonomic nervous system [ANS] function and brain morphology across the lifespan provides important insights into neurovisceral mechanisms underlying health and disease. Resting state ANS activity, indexed by measures of heart rate [HR] and its variability [HRV] has been associated with brain morphology, partic...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Juvenile onset of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is associated with increased likelihood of recurrent episodes of depression and more detrimental clinical trajectories. The aim of the current study was to investigate the effect of juvenile onset of MDD on emotion regulation as measured by self-report and Heart Rate Variability (HRV). Further, we w...

It is generally well-known, and scientifically well established, that music affects emotions and moods. However, only little is known about the influence of music on thoughts. This scarcity is particularly surprising given the importance of the valence of thoughts for psychological health and well-being. We presented excerpts of heroic- and sad-sou...

How do listeners respond to prediction errors within patterned sequence of sounds? To answer this question we carried out a statistical learning study using electroencephalography (EEG). In a continuous auditory stream of sound triplets the deviations were either (a) statistical, in terms of transitional probability, (b) physical, due to a change i...

Resting state autonomic nervous system activity [ANS] indexed by measures of heart rate [HR] and its variability [HRV], is associated with brain morphology, in particular cortical thickness [CT]. However, findings have been mixed regarding the regions of interest [ROI] associated with HR/HRV and the direction of the association. Sex and age differe...

Within the framework of statistical learning, many behavioural studies investigated the processing of unpredicted events. However, surprisingly few neurophysiological studies are available on this topic, and no statistical learning experiment has investigated electroencephalographic (EEG) correlates of processing events with different transition pr...

Unlabelled: The extent to which navigational spatial memory depends on hippocampal integrity in humans is not well documented. We investigated allocentric spatial recall using a virtual environment in a group of patients with severe hippocampal damage (SHD), a group of patients with "moderate" hippocampal damage (MHD), and a normal control group....

Increasing evidence is emerging for sexual dimorphism in the trajectory of white matter development in children assessed using volumetric MRI and more recently diffusion MRI. Recent studies using diffusion MRI have examined cohorts with a wide age range (typically between 5 and 30 years) showing focal regions of differential diffusivity and fractio...

Language and music share many properties, with a particularly strong overlap for prosody. Prosodic cues are generally regarded as crucial for language acquisition. Previous research has indicated that children with SLI fail to make use of these cues. As processing of prosodic information involves similar skills to those required in music perception...

Previous studies have shown that a cardiac signature of emotionality (referred to as EK, which can be computed from the standard 12 lead electrocardiogram, ECG), predicts inter-individual differences in the tendency to experience and express positive emotion. Here, we investigated whether EK values can be transiently modulated during stimulation wi...

The optic radiation (OR) is a component of the visual system known to be myelin mature very early in life. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and its unique ability to reconstruct the OR in vivo were used to study structural maturation through analysis of DTI metrics in a cohort of 90 children aged 5-18 years. As the OR is at risk of damage during epil...

Early life stress (ELS) is known to have considerable influence on brain development and affective functioning. Previous studies in clinical populations have shown that hippocampus and amygdala, two central structures of limbic emotion processing circuits, are predominantly affected by early stress exposure. Given the inconsistent findings on ELS-r...

Music is a basic and ubiquitous socio-cognitive domain. However, our understanding of the time course of the development of music perception, particularly regarding implicit knowledge of music-syntactic regularities, remains contradictory and incomplete: Some authors assume that the acquisition of knowledge about these regularities lasts until late...

Neonates treated for acute respiratory failure experience episodes of hypoxia. The hippocampus, a structure essential for memory, is particularly vulnerable to such insults. Hence, some neonates undergoing treatment for acute respiratory failure might sustain bilateral hippocampal pathology early in life and memory problems later in childhood. We i...

Studies addressing brain correlates of emotional personality have remained sparse, despite the involvement of emotional personality in health and well-being. This study investigates structural and functional brain correlates of psychological and physiological measures related to emotional personality. Psychological measures included neuroticism, ex...

It has long been debated which aspects of music perception are universal and which are developed only after exposure to a specific musical culture. Here we investigated whether "iconic" meaning in Western music, emerging from musical information resembling qualities of objects, or qualities of abstract concepts, can be recognized cross-culturally....

Tables listing all the word triplets presented in German, Mafa (using the International Phonetic alphabet IPA), and an English translation. (PDF)

Hierarchical structure with nested nonlocal dependencies is a key feature of human language and can be identified theoretically in most pieces of tonal music. However, previous studies have argued against the perception of such structures in music. Here, we show processing of nonlocal dependencies in music. We presented chorales by J. S. Bach and m...

The hippocampus, a structure located in the temporal lobes of the brain, is critical for the ability to recollect contextual details of past episodes. It is still debated whether the hippocampus also enables recognition memory for previously encountered context-free items. Brain imaging [1, 2] and neuropsychological patient studies [3, 4] have both...

There are well-established relations between personality and the heart, as evidenced by associations between negative emotions on the one hand, and coronary heart disease or chronic heart failure on the other. However, there are substantial gaps in our knowledge about relations between the heart and personality in healthy individuals. Here, we inve...

Models resulting from stepwise linear regressions with absolute values of all ECG amplitude waves (see Methods) as independent (predictor) variables, and body height (a), body weight (b), and body mass index (c) as dependent variables. : P-wave amplitude, : R-wave amplitude, : RS-wave amplitude, : T-wave amplitude. Subscript indicates the ECG lead....

Regression models. (a) Model resulting from stepwise linear regressions with absolute values of all ECG amplitude waves (see Methods), as well as body height, weight, and BMI, as independent (predictor) variables, and agreeableness (standard scores) as dependent variable. Note that this regression model included body height as a predictor variable...

Items for which the scores between the two groups ( values above and below the median of values) differed with effect sizes of Cohen's .2. A plus sign indicates that scores were higher (“agree”) for individuals with lower values, the minus sign indicates that scores were lower (“disagree”) for individuals with lower values. For example, individuals...

Standardized canonical discrimination coefficients. The dependent variables of the discriminant analyses were upper and lower quartiles of standard agreeableness scores (a), or upper and lower quartiles of standard positive emotion scores (b), predictor variables were the absolute ECG amplitude values, as well as body height, weight, and BMI. Abbre...

The white matter of the brain undergoes a range of structural changes throughout development; from conception to birth, in infancy, and onwards through childhood and adolescence. Several studies have used diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) to investigate these changes, but a consensus has not yet emerged on which white matter tracts underg...

Background: Music and language are basic, very old and ubiquitous human capabilities. Both are important communication systems of human species and very closely connected cognitive domains. Cognitive processes and their underlying neural correlates change during ontogeny and due to learning processes. This is associated with functional and structur...

The music we usually listen to in everyday life consists of either single melodies or harmonized melodies (i.e., of melodies "accompanied" by chords). However, differences in the neural mechanisms underlying melodic and harmonic processing have remained largely unknown. Using EEG, this study compared effects of music-syntactic processing between ch...

The question of how musical training can influence perceptual and cognitive abilities of children has been the subject of numerous past studies. However, evidence showing which neural mechanisms underlie changes in cognitive skills in another domain following musical training has remained sparse. Syntax processing in language and music has been sho...

It has long been debated which aspects of music perception are universal and which are developed only after exposure to a specific musical culture. Here, we report a crosscultural study with participants from a native African population (Mafa) and Western participants, with both groups being naive to the music of the other respective culture. Exper...

We investigated influences of short-term experience on music-syntactic processing, using a chord-sequence paradigm in which sequences ended on a harmony that was syntactically either regular or irregular. In contrast to previous studies (in which block durations were rather short), chord sequences were presented to participants for around 2 h while...

Both language and music consist of sequences that are structured according to syntactic regularities. We used two specific event-related brain potential (ERP) components to investigate music-syntactic processing in children: the ERAN (early right anterior negativity) and the N5. The neural resources underlying these processes have been posited to o...

We investigated electroencephalographic (EEG) correlates of moderate intermittent explosive disorder (mIED), which is characterized by uncontrollable, impulsive attacks that either manifest in aggressive outbursts of temper, or in implosive, auto-aggressive behaviour. In two Experiments, EEG data were recorded during rest conditions, and while subj...

Human personality has brain correlates that exert manifold influences on biological processes. This study investigates relations between emotional personality and heart activity. Our data demonstrate that emotional personality is related to a specific cardiac amplitude signature in the resting electrocardiogram (ECG). Two experiments using function...

The present study investigated music-syntactic processing with chord sequences that ended on either regular or irregular chord functions. Sequences were composed such that perceived differences in the cognitive processing between syntactically regular and irregular chords could not be due to the sensory processing of acoustic factors like pitch rep...

Music is an important human ability, which transcends cultures and has been present already since prehistoric times. Perceiving and practicing music is an extremely challenging task for the brain, which necessitates numerous cognitive processes. Different levels of musical expertise enable us to investigate the impact of training and learning on th...

Musik ist eine wichtige menschliche Fähigkeit, die sowohl kulturgeschichtlich sehr alt als auch kulturübergreifend ist. Das Wahrnehmung und Ausüben von Musik ist eine für das Gehirn äußerst aufwändige Aufgabe, die eine Vielzahl kognitiver Prozesse erfordert. Unterschiedliche Stufen musikalischer Expertise erlauben, Einflüsse von Training und Lernen...

Language and music are human universals involving perceptually discrete elements organized in hierarchically structured sequences. The set of principles governing the combination of these structural elements into sequences is known as syntax. A violation of expectancies concerning syntactic regularities may be reflected by two ERP components: the E...

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