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The neuropsychology of familiar people recognition through face and voice will be surveyed from the clinical and the cognitive point of view, taking into account modality-specific (prosopagnosia and phonagnosia) and multimodal person recognition disorders. Our starting assumption was that many patients with right temporal lobe atrophy are incorrectly labelled as prosopagnosics, because faces are often considered as the most important channel used to recognize familiar people. In fact a multimodal familiar person recognition disorder may more accurately characterise the deficit in these patients. The clinical and the cognitive implications of this starting point will be developed and some current research perspectives will be exposed. [more]

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What makes our experience of music possible – and effortless – is an intricate puzzle of cognitive processes, involving a subtle interplay of what psychologists refer to as bottom-up and top-down components. The key concept of expectation can be construed at the centre of a complex feedback loop between these components, relaying information in both directions, and at different time scales. This framework holds not just for music we hear (an exogenous/bottom-up process) but also for music we create in our minds (endogenous/top-down). One mode of acquiring musical knowledge is implicit learning, which gradually gets to shape our sensory preferences, e.g. for certain combinations of simultaneous notes over others (consonant over dissonant chords – or indeed, in some contexts, vice-versa!), and also our unfolding expectations relating to e.g. what musical event might come next. These expectations form the core of a set of intuitions that have been formalised as models of musical structure, most notably Schenkerian analysis. Such models can inspire quantifiable predictions about the temporal nature of our expectation – for instance, with regards to the moment in time when we feel a piece is "beginning to end". The sum of these intuitions endows us with a template that on the one hand enables us to make sense of music that we hear; but equally, also to (re)create music in our own minds – a process known as musical imagery, which shares commonalities with music perception not only at the cognitive level (e.g. both can be conjectured to stem from a single generative model) but also at the neuronal level. In this talk, I will describe three distinct studies from the Dresden Music Cognition Lab, that address – using behavioural and neuroimaging methods – individual elements of the expectation-mediated loop outlined above, namely (i) the (local) perception of consonance and dissonance; (ii) the (non-local) perception of hierarchical musical structures; and (iii) the role of harmonic function in imagined music. I will then attempt to integrate these findings into the larger questions of how expectation guides our listening and imagery of music, and how the brain is wired to make these processes run smoothly in the background. Keywords: Musical imagery, Schenkerian analysis, consonance and dissonance; decoding fMRI, multivariate pattern analysis, time series analyses. [more]

We all have our habits, good and bad. But only for some, habits go from bad to worse and behaviour becomes compulsive, as we see for example in addiction or clinical overeating. How is it that a useful mechanism such as our habit system can come to work against us? Why does it happen for only some and not others when faced with tempting rewards? And how can we get back in control? In my doctoral studies I aimed to increase our understanding of this by investigating the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying compulsive gambling (in gambling addiction) and eating behaviour (in a non-clinical population). Building on an extensive body of addiction literature, I used a variety of experimental paradigms to tap into different aspects of compulsive behaviour. I focussed in particular on altered reward processing and loss of control over automatic tendencies triggered by reward-related stimuli. Furthermore, I investigated the effects of a pharmacological (dopamine) and a behavioural (mindfulness) intervention on reward processing. [more]

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Human decision making often involves weighting of values obtained via the rewarding quality of experience, but can uniquely incorporate more abstract aspects such as information about possible long-term consequences. While the former is computationally simple and efficient, the latter requires utilization of a model about the world. I will present results of two studies aiming to disentangle unique learning mechanisms for both propensities. The first will focus on the cortical temporal dynamics of learning from reward compared to information revealed in the human EEG. The second will focus on regional specificity of neural correlates of learning from model-free and model-based outcomes that dissociate ventral from dorsal striatum in the fMRI. [more]