Cognitive and Affective Biopsychology
About
The working group “Cognitive and Affective Biopsychology”, led by Prof. Dr. Simon Eickhoff and co-led by Dr. Edna Cieslik, Dr. Felix Hoffstaedter, Dr. Robert Langner and Dr. Veronika Müller, aims to understand better how the brain contributes to human behaviour. The group investigates cognitive and socio-affective processes and their associations with brain activity, connectivity and morphology by applying state-of-the-art methodologies such as machine learning and large-scale meta-analyses.
Research Topics
Mental processes of particular interest to the group include attention and cognitive action control as well as emotional perception, experience and regulation. One of the main goals is to investigate how interindividual differences in these processes are reflected in the brain.
Furthermore, the group seeks to elucidate the neural correlates of cognitive and affective alterations in advanced age and conditions such as depression, schizophrenia or Parkinson’s disease.
The group applies a broad spectrum of multimodal neuroimaging methods to study brain–behaviour relationships. Approaches include innovative task-based fMRI studies, voxel-based morphometry as well as large-scale meta-analyses to identify brain regions and behavioural effects associated with particular mental processes. The interregional coupling between individual brain areas is investigated via resting-state functional connectivity analysis and meta-analytic connectivity modelling. The association of functional connectivity patterns with cognition and behaviour across individuals is studied using both correlational and out-of-sample prediction analyses. Additionally, the group is strongly involved in the methodological development of activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis. An emerging focus constitutes the study of determinants for accepting the use of artificial intelligence technologies in diagnostic brain imaging.