Stefanie Meliss

University of Reading · Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics (CINN)

Human memory is selective and not all experiences are remembered. Both monetary rewards/incentives and curiosity have been found to motivate and facilitate learning by dopaminergic midbrain projections to the hippocampus during encoding. In this study, we examined potential brain mechanisms during early consolidation period that jointly or independ...

Economic and decision-making theories suppose that people would disengage from a task with near zero success probability, because this implicates little normative utility values. However, humans often are motivated for an extremely challenging task, even without any extrinsic incentives. The current study aimed to address the nature of this challen...

Curiosity - the intrinsic desire to know - is a concept central to the human mind and knowledge acquisition. Experimental studies on information-seeking have found that curiosity facilitates memory encoding and exhibits similar reward,ng properties as extrinsic rewards/incentives by eliciting a dopaminergic response. However, it is not clear whethe...

Videos of magic tricks offer lots of opportunities to study the human mind. They violate the expectations of the viewer (i.e., causing strong prediction errors), misdirect attention, and elicit a variety of epistemic emotions such as surprise and curiosity. Herein we describe and share the Magic, Memory, and Curiosity (MMC) dataset where 50 partici...

Neuroimaging has advanced our understanding of human psychology using reductionist stimuli that often do not resemble information the brain naturally encounters. It has improved our understanding of the network organization of the brain mostly through analyses of ‘resting-state’ data for which the functions of networks cannot be verifiably labelled...

Social rewards are a broad and heterogeneous set of stimuli including for instance smiling faces, gestures, or praise. They have been widely investigated in cognitive and social neuroscience as well as psychology. Research often contrasts the neural processing of social rewards with non-social ones, with the aim to demonstrate the privileged and un...

There has been considerable interest in empirical research on epistemic emotions, i.e., emotions related to knowledge-generating qualities of cognitive tasks and activities such as curiosity, interest, and surprise. One big challenge when studying epistemic emotions is systematically inducting these emotions in restricted experimental settings. The...

Neuroimaging has advanced our understanding of human psychology using reductionist stimuli that often do not resemble information the brain naturally encounters. It has improved our understanding of the network organization of the brain mostly through analyses of 'resting-state' data for which the functions of networks cannot be verifiably labelled...

Social rewards are a broad and heterogeneous set of stimuli, which have been widely investigated in cognitive and social neuroscience/psychology. Research often contrasts the neural processing of social rewards with non-social ones, with the aim to demonstrate the privileged and unique nature of social rewards or to examine shared neural processing...

Recent years have seen considerable interest in empirical research on epistemic emotions, i.e. emotions related to knowledge-generating qualities of cognitive tasks and activities such as curiosity, interest, and surprise. One big challenge when studying epistemic emotions is systematically inducting these emotions in restricted experimental settin...

Economic and decision-making theories suppose that people would disengage from an extremely difficult task, because such a task does not implicate any normative utility values (i.e. success probability is almost zero). However, humans are often motivated for an extremely challenging task with little chance of success, even without any extrinsic inc...

Objectives: Neurocognitive impairments are commonly observed in adults suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The picture is less clear in adolescents. Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) may have an independent influence on neuropsychological test performance and provide partial explanatory power of the inconsistent findings. We hypothesiz...

How does characterizing a group as hostile and dangerous shape behavior? We present two high-powered experimental studies, a close and a conceptual replication of the ‘Police Officer's Dilemma’ (Correll et al., 2002). Experiment 1 (N = 164)—a close replication—uses the original shooter task with Arab-Muslim targets. Participants showed a so-called...