Journal of Systems and Integrative Neuroscience, 2015
With the aim to improve the ecological validity when studying real life phenomena, research has i... more With the aim to improve the ecological validity when studying real life phenomena, research has increasingly been employing more complex and realistic materials, from pictorial and verbal (e.g., movies vs. pictures, narratives vs. single words), to interactive or virtual settings. This article has the objective to understand the emotional impact of these different types of media. It first summarizes neuroimaging findings on emotion processing, focusing on the development toward more realistic and complex materials. The presented literature shows that all media types, simple words or complex movies, may induce consistent emotional responses, mirrored in activations in core emotion regions. Regions related to the (embodied) simulation of another's bodily state, and mentalizing, the cognitive representation of another's mental state, are particularly reported in response to more complex, narrative or social materials. Other media-specific responses are described in sensory or language brain regions, while dynamic and multimodal stimuli are reported to yield behavioral advantages together with increased emotional brain responses. Finally, the article discusses the role of immersive processes for emotional engagement in different media settings. The potential to make the viewer immerse into fictional or artificial worlds, is proposed as a crucial modulator for emotional responses in different media types, leading to the formulation of open questions and implications for future research on emotion processing.
Zahlreiche aktuelle neurokognitive Untersuchungen deuten an, dass identifizierbare neuronale Netz... more Zahlreiche aktuelle neurokognitive Untersuchungen deuten an, dass identifizierbare neuronale Netzwerke an wichtigen Prozessen beteiligt sind, die vielen schulischen und alltäglichen Lernaufgaben zugrunde liegen, insbesondere Informationsverarbeitungsvorgängen beim zielbezogenen und leistungsgerechten Umgang mit Buchstaben und Wörtern, Zahlen oder Bildern (Lesen, Rechnen, Objekterkennung). Im Vordergrund stehen dabei Fragen des Erwerbs und der Enkodierung (Lernen), der Konsolidierung und des Abrufs (Gedächtnis) von Informationen. Dieser
Talking about emotion and sharing emotional experiences is a key component of human interaction. ... more Talking about emotion and sharing emotional experiences is a key component of human interaction. Specifically, individuals often consider the reactions of other people when evaluating the meaning and impact of an emotional stimulus. It has not yet been investigated, however, how emotional arousal ratings and physiological responses elicited by affective stimuli are influenced by the rating of an interaction partner. In the present study, pairs of participants were asked to rate and communicate the degree of their emotional arousal while viewing affective pictures. Strikingly, participants adjusted their arousal ratings to match up with their interaction partner. In anticipation of the affective picture, the interaction partner's arousal ratings correlated positively with activity in anterior insula and prefrontal cortex. During picture presentation, social influence was reflected in the ventral striatum, that is, activity in the ventral striatum correlated negatively with the in...
The current study investigated the role played by conflict monitoring in a lexical-decision task ... more The current study investigated the role played by conflict monitoring in a lexical-decision task involving competing word representations, using event-related potentials. We extended the multiple read-out model (Grainger and Jacobs, 1996), a connectionist model of word recognition, to quantify conflict by means of Hopfield Energy, which is defined as the sum of the products of all orthographic word node pair activations within the artificial mental lexicon of this model. With increasing conflict levels in nonwords, a late negativity increased in amplitude (400-600 ms) accompanied by activation of the anterior cingulate cortex and the medial frontal gyrus. The simulated conflict predicted the amplitudes associated with this mediofrontal conflict-monitoring network on an item level, and is consistent with the conflict-monitoring theory.
Zeitschrift für Psychologie / Journal of Psychology, 2006
Zusammenfassung. Vor zehn Jahren wurde eine Reform der deutschen Orthografie beschlossen. Anhand ... more Zusammenfassung. Vor zehn Jahren wurde eine Reform der deutschen Orthografie beschlossen. Anhand einer Blickbewegungsstudie, an der sowohl erwachsene Leser als auch Kinder teilnahmen, sollte untersucht werden, welche Auswirkungen die Rechtschreibreform auf das Lesen hatte. Die Ergebnisse liefern erste Hinweise dafür, dass die Rechtschreibreform die Worterkennung insgesamt nicht beeinträchtigt hat. Lediglich die Wörter zum Erhalt der Stammschreibung in Zusammensetzungen (Balletttänzerin vs. Ballettänzerin) konnten sowohl von Kindern als auch von Erwachsenen in alter Rechtschreibung schneller gelesen werden. Ein gemischtes Bild ergab sich außerdem bei der Getrenntschreibung (kennen lernen vs. kennenlernen): Hier können zwar Erwachsene die zusammengeschriebenen alten Wörter besser verarbeiten, Kinder hingegen die neu auseinander geschriebenen. Einerseits wird für die konsequente Umsetzung einer einheitlichen Schreibweise vor allem im Sinne der Kinder plädiert, andererseits auf die Notw...
Our life is full of stories: some of them depict real-life events and were reported, e.g. in the ... more Our life is full of stories: some of them depict real-life events and were reported, e.g. in the daily news or in autobiographies, whereas other stories, as often presented to us in movies and novels, are fictional. However, we have only little insights in the neurocognitive processes underlying the reading of factual as compared to fictional contents. We investigated the neurocognitive effects of reading short narratives, labeled to be either factual or fictional. Reading in a factual mode engaged an activation pattern suggesting an action-based reconstruction of the events depicted in a story. This process seems to be past-oriented and leads to shorter reaction times at the behavioral level. In contrast, the brain activation patterns corresponding to reading fiction seem to reflect a constructive simulation of what might have happened. This is in line with studies on imagination of possible past or future events.
While watching movies, the brain integrates the visual information and the musical soundtrack int... more While watching movies, the brain integrates the visual information and the musical soundtrack into a coherent percept. Multisensory integration can lead to emotion elicitation on which soundtrack valences may have a modulatory impact. Here, dynamic kissing scenes from romantic comedies were presented to 22 participants (13 females) during functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning. The kissing scenes were either accompanied by happy music, sad music or no music. Evidence from cross-modal studies motivated a predefined three-region network for multisensory integration of emotion, consisting of fusiform gyrus (FG), amygdala (AMY) and anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG). The interactions in this network were investigated using dynamic causal models of effective connectivity. This revealed bilinear modulations by happy and sad music with suppression effects on the connectivity from FG and AMY to aSTG. Non-linear dynamic causal modeling showed a suppressive gating effect of aSTG on fusiform-amygdalar connectivity. In conclusion, fusiform to amygdala coupling strength is modulated via feedback through aSTG as region for multisensory integration of emotional material. This mechanism was emotion-specific and more pronounced for sad music. Therefore, soundtrack valences may modulate emotion elicitation in movies by differentially changing preprocessed visual information to the amygdala.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 2014
Whereas semantic, logical, and narrative features of verbal humor are well-researched, phonologic... more Whereas semantic, logical, and narrative features of verbal humor are well-researched, phonological and prosodie dimensions of verbal funniness are hardly explored. In a 2 X 2 design we varied rhyme and meter in humorous couplets. Rhyme and meter enhanced funniness ratings and supported faster processing. Rhyming couplets also elicited more intense and more positive affective responses, increased subjective comprehensibility and more accurate memory. The humor effect is attributed to special rhyme and meter features distinctive of humoristic poetry in several languages. Verses that employ these formal features make an artful use of typical poetic vices of amateurish poems written for birthday parties or other occasions. Their metrical patterning sounds "mechanical" rather than genuinely "poetic"; they also disregard rules for "good" rhymes. The processing of such verses is discussed in terms of a metacognitive integration of their poetically deviant features into an overall effect of processing ease. The study highlights the importance of nonsemantic rhetorical features in language processing.
It is hypothesized that written languages differ in the preferred grain size of units that emerge... more It is hypothesized that written languages differ in the preferred grain size of units that emerge during reading acquisition. Smaller units (graphemes, phonemes) are thought to play a dominant role in relatively consistent orthographies (e.g., German), whereas larger units (bodies, rhymes) are thought to be more important in relatively inconsistent orthographies (e.g., English). This hypothesis was tested by having native English and German speakers read identical words and nonwords in their respective languages (zoo-Zoo, sand-Sand, etc.). Although the English participants exhibited stronger body-rhyme effects, the German participants exhibited a stronger length effect for words and nonwords. Thus, identical items were processed differently in different orthographies. These results suggest that orthographic consistency determines not only the relative contribution of orthographic versus phonological codes within a given orthography, but also the preferred grain size of units that ar...
Electrophysiological correlates of the behaviorally well-documented inhibitory effect of first sy... more Electrophysiological correlates of the behaviorally well-documented inhibitory effect of first syllable-frequency during lexical access are presented. In a lexical decision task, response times to words with high-frequency first syllables were longer than those to words with low-frequency first syllables and resulted in more negative event-related potentials (ERPs) in an early time window from 190-280 ms and in the N400 component. The onset of the observed first syllable-frequency effect was prior to the onset of the effect of lexicality (i.e., the first reliable differentiation in ERP waveforms in response to words and pseudowords, a potential marker of lexical access). The present study's results support Barber et al.'s [6] notion of the prelexical nature of the first syllable-frequency effect by (A) providing evidence for electrophysiological correlates of first syllable-frequency in another, non-Romance orthography (i.e., German), (B) relating the onset of the first-syllable-frequency effect to the onset of the lexicality effect and (C) strengthening this pattern of results by means of a novel item-based analysis of ERP data. Implications of the prelexical nature of the inhibitory first syllablefrequency effect for computational models of reading, specifically for Ans et al. 's [4] multipletrace memory (MTM) model of reading are discussed.
Comorbidity of learning disabilities is a very common phenomenon which is intensively studied in ... more Comorbidity of learning disabilities is a very common phenomenon which is intensively studied in genetics, neuropsychology, prevalence studies and causal deficit research. In studies on the behavioral manifestation of learning disabilities, however, comorbidity is often neglected. In the present study, we systematically examined the reading behavior of German-speaking children with dyslexia, of children with attentional problems, of children with comorbid dyslexia and attentional problems and of normally developing children by measuring their reading accuracy, naming latencies and eye movement patterns during single word reading. We manipulated word difficulty by contrasting (1) short vs. long words with (2) either low or high sublexical complexity (indexed by consonant cluster density). Children with dyslexia only (DYS) showed the expected reading fluency impairment of poor readers in regular orthographies but no accuracy problem. In contrast, comorbid children (DYS+AD) had significantly higher error rates than all other groups, but less of a problem with reading fluency than DYS. Concurrently recorded eye movement measures revealed that DYS made the highest number of fixations, but exhibited shorter mean single fixations than DYS+AD. Word length had the strongest effect on dyslexic children, whereas consonant cluster density affected all groups equally. Theoretical implications of these behavioral and eye movement patterns are discussed and the necessity for controlling for comorbid attentional deficits in children with reading deficits is highlighted.
The present study aimed at investigating the behavioral effects and neuronal correlates of emotio... more The present study aimed at investigating the behavioral effects and neuronal correlates of emotional content and emotional components, i.e. valence and arousal, in the context of a verbal working memory task. Our findings in twenty healthy male subjects demonstrate that (1) word valence has no impact on performance in the verbal working memory task, and (2) that emotion leads to an increase of activation in cognition-related lateral prefrontal regions, whereas cognitive effort yields enhanced deactivation in emotion-related cortical midline regions. The stronger dorsolateral prefrontal recruitment during emotional stimuli may reflect an arousal effect or higher cognitive effort due to interference with emotion.
To date, a number of studies have demonstrated the existence of mismatches between children's... more To date, a number of studies have demonstrated the existence of mismatches between children's implicit and explicit knowledge at certain points in development that become manifest by their gestures and gaze orientation in different problem solving contexts. Stimulated by this research, we used eye movement measurement to investigate the development of basic knowledge about numerical magnitude in primary school children. Sixty‐six children from grades one to three (i.e. 6–9 years) were presented with two parallel versions of a number line estimation task of which one was restricted to behavioural measures, whereas the other included the recording of eye movement data. The results of the eye movement experiment indicate a quantitative increase as well as a qualitative change in children's implicit knowledge about numerical magnitudes in this age group that precedes the overt, that is, behavioural, demonstration of explicit numerical knowledge. The finding that children's e...
Previous research using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) suggested that phonological process... more Previous research using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) suggested that phonological processing in visual word recognition occurs rather late, typically after semantic or syntactic processing. Here, we show that phonological activation in visual word recognition can be observed much earlier. Using a lexical decision task, we show that ERPs to pseudohomophones (PsHs) (e.g., ROZE) differed from well-matched spelling controls (e.g., ROFE) as early as 150 ms (P150) after stimulus onset. The PsH effect occurred as early as the word frequency effect suggesting that phonological activation occurs early enough to influence lexical access. Low-resolution electromagnetic tomography analysis (LORETA) revealed that left temporoparietal and right frontotemporal areas are the likely brain regions associated with the processing of phonological information at the lexical level. Altogether, the results show that phonological processes are activated early in visual word recognition and play an important role in lexical access.
The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, Jan 29, 2012
The corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) system coordinates neuroendocrine and behavioral respon... more The corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) system coordinates neuroendocrine and behavioral responses to stress and has been implicated in the development of major depressive disorder (MDD). Recent reports suggest that GG-homozygous individuals of a single nucleotide polymorphism (rs110402) in the CRH receptor 1 (CRHR1) gene show behavioral and neuroendocrine evidence of stress vulnerability. The present study explores whether those observations extend to the neuronal processing of emotional stimuli in humans. CRHR1 was genotyped in 83 controls and a preliminary sample of 16 unmedicated patients with MDD who completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan while viewing blocks of positive, negative, and neutral words. In addition, potential mediating factors such as early life stress, sex, personality traits, and negative memory bias were examined. Robust differences in blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal were found in healthy controls (A allele carriers > GG-hom...
We investigated how processing fluency and defamiliarization (the art of rendering familiar notio... more We investigated how processing fluency and defamiliarization (the art of rendering familiar notions unfamiliar) contribute to the affective and esthetic processing of reading in an event-related functional magnetic-resonance-imaging experiment.We compared the neural correlates of processing (a) familiar German proverbs, (b) unfamiliar proverbs, (c) defamiliarized variations with altered content relative to the original proverb (proverb-variants), (d) defamiliarized versions with unexpected wording but the same content as the original proverb (proverb-substitutions), and (e) non-rhetorical sentences. Here, we demonstrate that defamiliarization is an effective way of guiding attention, but that the degree of affective involvement depends on the type of defamiliarization: enhanced activation in affect-related regions (orbito-frontal cortex, medPFC) was found only if defamiliarization altered the content of the original proverb. Defamiliarization on the level of wording was associated with attention processes and error monitoring. Although proverb-variants evoked activation in affect-related regions, familiar proverbs received the highest beauty ratings.
Graphemes are commonly de®ned as the written representation of phonemes. For example, the word `B... more Graphemes are commonly de®ned as the written representation of phonemes. For example, the word `BREAD' is composed of the four phonemes /b/, /r/, /e/ and /d/, and consequently, of the four graphemes `B', `R', `EA', and `D'. Graphemes can thus be considered the minimal `functional bridges' in the mapping between orthography and phonology. In the present study, we investigated the hypothesis that graphemes are processed as perceptual units by the reading system. If the reading system processes graphemes as units, then detecting a letter in a word should be harder when this letter is embedded in a multi-letter grapheme than when it corresponds to a single-letter grapheme. In Experiment 1A, done in English, participants were slower to detect a target letter in a word when the target letter was embedded in multi-letter grapheme (i.e. `A' in `BEACH') than when it corresponded to a single-letter grapheme (i.e. `A' in `PLACE'). In Experiment 1B, this effect was replicated in French. In Experiment 2, done in English, this grapheme effect remained when phonemic similarity between the target letter alone and the target letter inside the word was controlled. Together, the results are consistent with the assumption that graphemes are processed as perceptual reading units in alphabetic writing systems such as English or French.
Journal of Systems and Integrative Neuroscience, 2015
With the aim to improve the ecological validity when studying real life phenomena, research has i... more With the aim to improve the ecological validity when studying real life phenomena, research has increasingly been employing more complex and realistic materials, from pictorial and verbal (e.g., movies vs. pictures, narratives vs. single words), to interactive or virtual settings. This article has the objective to understand the emotional impact of these different types of media. It first summarizes neuroimaging findings on emotion processing, focusing on the development toward more realistic and complex materials. The presented literature shows that all media types, simple words or complex movies, may induce consistent emotional responses, mirrored in activations in core emotion regions. Regions related to the (embodied) simulation of another's bodily state, and mentalizing, the cognitive representation of another's mental state, are particularly reported in response to more complex, narrative or social materials. Other media-specific responses are described in sensory or language brain regions, while dynamic and multimodal stimuli are reported to yield behavioral advantages together with increased emotional brain responses. Finally, the article discusses the role of immersive processes for emotional engagement in different media settings. The potential to make the viewer immerse into fictional or artificial worlds, is proposed as a crucial modulator for emotional responses in different media types, leading to the formulation of open questions and implications for future research on emotion processing.
Zahlreiche aktuelle neurokognitive Untersuchungen deuten an, dass identifizierbare neuronale Netz... more Zahlreiche aktuelle neurokognitive Untersuchungen deuten an, dass identifizierbare neuronale Netzwerke an wichtigen Prozessen beteiligt sind, die vielen schulischen und alltäglichen Lernaufgaben zugrunde liegen, insbesondere Informationsverarbeitungsvorgängen beim zielbezogenen und leistungsgerechten Umgang mit Buchstaben und Wörtern, Zahlen oder Bildern (Lesen, Rechnen, Objekterkennung). Im Vordergrund stehen dabei Fragen des Erwerbs und der Enkodierung (Lernen), der Konsolidierung und des Abrufs (Gedächtnis) von Informationen. Dieser
Talking about emotion and sharing emotional experiences is a key component of human interaction. ... more Talking about emotion and sharing emotional experiences is a key component of human interaction. Specifically, individuals often consider the reactions of other people when evaluating the meaning and impact of an emotional stimulus. It has not yet been investigated, however, how emotional arousal ratings and physiological responses elicited by affective stimuli are influenced by the rating of an interaction partner. In the present study, pairs of participants were asked to rate and communicate the degree of their emotional arousal while viewing affective pictures. Strikingly, participants adjusted their arousal ratings to match up with their interaction partner. In anticipation of the affective picture, the interaction partner's arousal ratings correlated positively with activity in anterior insula and prefrontal cortex. During picture presentation, social influence was reflected in the ventral striatum, that is, activity in the ventral striatum correlated negatively with the in...
The current study investigated the role played by conflict monitoring in a lexical-decision task ... more The current study investigated the role played by conflict monitoring in a lexical-decision task involving competing word representations, using event-related potentials. We extended the multiple read-out model (Grainger and Jacobs, 1996), a connectionist model of word recognition, to quantify conflict by means of Hopfield Energy, which is defined as the sum of the products of all orthographic word node pair activations within the artificial mental lexicon of this model. With increasing conflict levels in nonwords, a late negativity increased in amplitude (400-600 ms) accompanied by activation of the anterior cingulate cortex and the medial frontal gyrus. The simulated conflict predicted the amplitudes associated with this mediofrontal conflict-monitoring network on an item level, and is consistent with the conflict-monitoring theory.
Zeitschrift für Psychologie / Journal of Psychology, 2006
Zusammenfassung. Vor zehn Jahren wurde eine Reform der deutschen Orthografie beschlossen. Anhand ... more Zusammenfassung. Vor zehn Jahren wurde eine Reform der deutschen Orthografie beschlossen. Anhand einer Blickbewegungsstudie, an der sowohl erwachsene Leser als auch Kinder teilnahmen, sollte untersucht werden, welche Auswirkungen die Rechtschreibreform auf das Lesen hatte. Die Ergebnisse liefern erste Hinweise dafür, dass die Rechtschreibreform die Worterkennung insgesamt nicht beeinträchtigt hat. Lediglich die Wörter zum Erhalt der Stammschreibung in Zusammensetzungen (Balletttänzerin vs. Ballettänzerin) konnten sowohl von Kindern als auch von Erwachsenen in alter Rechtschreibung schneller gelesen werden. Ein gemischtes Bild ergab sich außerdem bei der Getrenntschreibung (kennen lernen vs. kennenlernen): Hier können zwar Erwachsene die zusammengeschriebenen alten Wörter besser verarbeiten, Kinder hingegen die neu auseinander geschriebenen. Einerseits wird für die konsequente Umsetzung einer einheitlichen Schreibweise vor allem im Sinne der Kinder plädiert, andererseits auf die Notw...
Our life is full of stories: some of them depict real-life events and were reported, e.g. in the ... more Our life is full of stories: some of them depict real-life events and were reported, e.g. in the daily news or in autobiographies, whereas other stories, as often presented to us in movies and novels, are fictional. However, we have only little insights in the neurocognitive processes underlying the reading of factual as compared to fictional contents. We investigated the neurocognitive effects of reading short narratives, labeled to be either factual or fictional. Reading in a factual mode engaged an activation pattern suggesting an action-based reconstruction of the events depicted in a story. This process seems to be past-oriented and leads to shorter reaction times at the behavioral level. In contrast, the brain activation patterns corresponding to reading fiction seem to reflect a constructive simulation of what might have happened. This is in line with studies on imagination of possible past or future events.
While watching movies, the brain integrates the visual information and the musical soundtrack int... more While watching movies, the brain integrates the visual information and the musical soundtrack into a coherent percept. Multisensory integration can lead to emotion elicitation on which soundtrack valences may have a modulatory impact. Here, dynamic kissing scenes from romantic comedies were presented to 22 participants (13 females) during functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning. The kissing scenes were either accompanied by happy music, sad music or no music. Evidence from cross-modal studies motivated a predefined three-region network for multisensory integration of emotion, consisting of fusiform gyrus (FG), amygdala (AMY) and anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG). The interactions in this network were investigated using dynamic causal models of effective connectivity. This revealed bilinear modulations by happy and sad music with suppression effects on the connectivity from FG and AMY to aSTG. Non-linear dynamic causal modeling showed a suppressive gating effect of aSTG on fusiform-amygdalar connectivity. In conclusion, fusiform to amygdala coupling strength is modulated via feedback through aSTG as region for multisensory integration of emotional material. This mechanism was emotion-specific and more pronounced for sad music. Therefore, soundtrack valences may modulate emotion elicitation in movies by differentially changing preprocessed visual information to the amygdala.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 2014
Whereas semantic, logical, and narrative features of verbal humor are well-researched, phonologic... more Whereas semantic, logical, and narrative features of verbal humor are well-researched, phonological and prosodie dimensions of verbal funniness are hardly explored. In a 2 X 2 design we varied rhyme and meter in humorous couplets. Rhyme and meter enhanced funniness ratings and supported faster processing. Rhyming couplets also elicited more intense and more positive affective responses, increased subjective comprehensibility and more accurate memory. The humor effect is attributed to special rhyme and meter features distinctive of humoristic poetry in several languages. Verses that employ these formal features make an artful use of typical poetic vices of amateurish poems written for birthday parties or other occasions. Their metrical patterning sounds "mechanical" rather than genuinely "poetic"; they also disregard rules for "good" rhymes. The processing of such verses is discussed in terms of a metacognitive integration of their poetically deviant features into an overall effect of processing ease. The study highlights the importance of nonsemantic rhetorical features in language processing.
It is hypothesized that written languages differ in the preferred grain size of units that emerge... more It is hypothesized that written languages differ in the preferred grain size of units that emerge during reading acquisition. Smaller units (graphemes, phonemes) are thought to play a dominant role in relatively consistent orthographies (e.g., German), whereas larger units (bodies, rhymes) are thought to be more important in relatively inconsistent orthographies (e.g., English). This hypothesis was tested by having native English and German speakers read identical words and nonwords in their respective languages (zoo-Zoo, sand-Sand, etc.). Although the English participants exhibited stronger body-rhyme effects, the German participants exhibited a stronger length effect for words and nonwords. Thus, identical items were processed differently in different orthographies. These results suggest that orthographic consistency determines not only the relative contribution of orthographic versus phonological codes within a given orthography, but also the preferred grain size of units that ar...
Electrophysiological correlates of the behaviorally well-documented inhibitory effect of first sy... more Electrophysiological correlates of the behaviorally well-documented inhibitory effect of first syllable-frequency during lexical access are presented. In a lexical decision task, response times to words with high-frequency first syllables were longer than those to words with low-frequency first syllables and resulted in more negative event-related potentials (ERPs) in an early time window from 190-280 ms and in the N400 component. The onset of the observed first syllable-frequency effect was prior to the onset of the effect of lexicality (i.e., the first reliable differentiation in ERP waveforms in response to words and pseudowords, a potential marker of lexical access). The present study's results support Barber et al.'s [6] notion of the prelexical nature of the first syllable-frequency effect by (A) providing evidence for electrophysiological correlates of first syllable-frequency in another, non-Romance orthography (i.e., German), (B) relating the onset of the first-syllable-frequency effect to the onset of the lexicality effect and (C) strengthening this pattern of results by means of a novel item-based analysis of ERP data. Implications of the prelexical nature of the inhibitory first syllablefrequency effect for computational models of reading, specifically for Ans et al. 's [4] multipletrace memory (MTM) model of reading are discussed.
Comorbidity of learning disabilities is a very common phenomenon which is intensively studied in ... more Comorbidity of learning disabilities is a very common phenomenon which is intensively studied in genetics, neuropsychology, prevalence studies and causal deficit research. In studies on the behavioral manifestation of learning disabilities, however, comorbidity is often neglected. In the present study, we systematically examined the reading behavior of German-speaking children with dyslexia, of children with attentional problems, of children with comorbid dyslexia and attentional problems and of normally developing children by measuring their reading accuracy, naming latencies and eye movement patterns during single word reading. We manipulated word difficulty by contrasting (1) short vs. long words with (2) either low or high sublexical complexity (indexed by consonant cluster density). Children with dyslexia only (DYS) showed the expected reading fluency impairment of poor readers in regular orthographies but no accuracy problem. In contrast, comorbid children (DYS+AD) had significantly higher error rates than all other groups, but less of a problem with reading fluency than DYS. Concurrently recorded eye movement measures revealed that DYS made the highest number of fixations, but exhibited shorter mean single fixations than DYS+AD. Word length had the strongest effect on dyslexic children, whereas consonant cluster density affected all groups equally. Theoretical implications of these behavioral and eye movement patterns are discussed and the necessity for controlling for comorbid attentional deficits in children with reading deficits is highlighted.
The present study aimed at investigating the behavioral effects and neuronal correlates of emotio... more The present study aimed at investigating the behavioral effects and neuronal correlates of emotional content and emotional components, i.e. valence and arousal, in the context of a verbal working memory task. Our findings in twenty healthy male subjects demonstrate that (1) word valence has no impact on performance in the verbal working memory task, and (2) that emotion leads to an increase of activation in cognition-related lateral prefrontal regions, whereas cognitive effort yields enhanced deactivation in emotion-related cortical midline regions. The stronger dorsolateral prefrontal recruitment during emotional stimuli may reflect an arousal effect or higher cognitive effort due to interference with emotion.
To date, a number of studies have demonstrated the existence of mismatches between children's... more To date, a number of studies have demonstrated the existence of mismatches between children's implicit and explicit knowledge at certain points in development that become manifest by their gestures and gaze orientation in different problem solving contexts. Stimulated by this research, we used eye movement measurement to investigate the development of basic knowledge about numerical magnitude in primary school children. Sixty‐six children from grades one to three (i.e. 6–9 years) were presented with two parallel versions of a number line estimation task of which one was restricted to behavioural measures, whereas the other included the recording of eye movement data. The results of the eye movement experiment indicate a quantitative increase as well as a qualitative change in children's implicit knowledge about numerical magnitudes in this age group that precedes the overt, that is, behavioural, demonstration of explicit numerical knowledge. The finding that children's e...
Previous research using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) suggested that phonological process... more Previous research using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) suggested that phonological processing in visual word recognition occurs rather late, typically after semantic or syntactic processing. Here, we show that phonological activation in visual word recognition can be observed much earlier. Using a lexical decision task, we show that ERPs to pseudohomophones (PsHs) (e.g., ROZE) differed from well-matched spelling controls (e.g., ROFE) as early as 150 ms (P150) after stimulus onset. The PsH effect occurred as early as the word frequency effect suggesting that phonological activation occurs early enough to influence lexical access. Low-resolution electromagnetic tomography analysis (LORETA) revealed that left temporoparietal and right frontotemporal areas are the likely brain regions associated with the processing of phonological information at the lexical level. Altogether, the results show that phonological processes are activated early in visual word recognition and play an important role in lexical access.
The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, Jan 29, 2012
The corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) system coordinates neuroendocrine and behavioral respon... more The corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) system coordinates neuroendocrine and behavioral responses to stress and has been implicated in the development of major depressive disorder (MDD). Recent reports suggest that GG-homozygous individuals of a single nucleotide polymorphism (rs110402) in the CRH receptor 1 (CRHR1) gene show behavioral and neuroendocrine evidence of stress vulnerability. The present study explores whether those observations extend to the neuronal processing of emotional stimuli in humans. CRHR1 was genotyped in 83 controls and a preliminary sample of 16 unmedicated patients with MDD who completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan while viewing blocks of positive, negative, and neutral words. In addition, potential mediating factors such as early life stress, sex, personality traits, and negative memory bias were examined. Robust differences in blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal were found in healthy controls (A allele carriers > GG-hom...
We investigated how processing fluency and defamiliarization (the art of rendering familiar notio... more We investigated how processing fluency and defamiliarization (the art of rendering familiar notions unfamiliar) contribute to the affective and esthetic processing of reading in an event-related functional magnetic-resonance-imaging experiment.We compared the neural correlates of processing (a) familiar German proverbs, (b) unfamiliar proverbs, (c) defamiliarized variations with altered content relative to the original proverb (proverb-variants), (d) defamiliarized versions with unexpected wording but the same content as the original proverb (proverb-substitutions), and (e) non-rhetorical sentences. Here, we demonstrate that defamiliarization is an effective way of guiding attention, but that the degree of affective involvement depends on the type of defamiliarization: enhanced activation in affect-related regions (orbito-frontal cortex, medPFC) was found only if defamiliarization altered the content of the original proverb. Defamiliarization on the level of wording was associated with attention processes and error monitoring. Although proverb-variants evoked activation in affect-related regions, familiar proverbs received the highest beauty ratings.
Graphemes are commonly de®ned as the written representation of phonemes. For example, the word `B... more Graphemes are commonly de®ned as the written representation of phonemes. For example, the word `BREAD' is composed of the four phonemes /b/, /r/, /e/ and /d/, and consequently, of the four graphemes `B', `R', `EA', and `D'. Graphemes can thus be considered the minimal `functional bridges' in the mapping between orthography and phonology. In the present study, we investigated the hypothesis that graphemes are processed as perceptual units by the reading system. If the reading system processes graphemes as units, then detecting a letter in a word should be harder when this letter is embedded in a multi-letter grapheme than when it corresponds to a single-letter grapheme. In Experiment 1A, done in English, participants were slower to detect a target letter in a word when the target letter was embedded in multi-letter grapheme (i.e. `A' in `BEACH') than when it corresponded to a single-letter grapheme (i.e. `A' in `PLACE'). In Experiment 1B, this effect was replicated in French. In Experiment 2, done in English, this grapheme effect remained when phonemic similarity between the target letter alone and the target letter inside the word was controlled. Together, the results are consistent with the assumption that graphemes are processed as perceptual reading units in alphabetic writing systems such as English or French.
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Papers by Art Jacobs