News

Our PhD student Bernadette Hippmann published a new article in Human Brain Mapping. In the study, she tested adult participants in an fMRI paradigm, investigating the neural connectivity behind executive control and the influence of reward vs. punishment. The full article can be found here: Hippmann, B., Tzvi, E., Göttlich, M., Weiblen, R., Münte, T.,…

Measurements and testing in the Babylab still aren’t back to normal due to the impact of the pandemic, but we are nevertheless busy writing and analyzing data. Have a look at the commentary that just came out in Psychological Science, in which we in collaboration with several other researchers discuss entrainment and infant EEG data.…

First results from our project on the impact of maternal odor on emotion processing in infancy are out! Testing 7-month-olds in an EEG paradigm, we found that infants at this age show a reduced fear response when they can smell their mother. This suggests that maternal odor might be a strong enough signal to make…

The safety of our participants, their family and our lab members is our top priority. Therefore we strictly follow the safety guidelines for measurements developed by the University of Lübeck in times of Corona. Specifically, this means: All measurements at the lab take place following the current 2G+ guidelines, meaning that all adults coming to…

Our new review article discussing the current state of research on unconscious face processing in infancy was just accepted! Jessen, S., & Grossmann, T. (in press). The developmental origins of subliminal face processing. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. 

In a new study in adult participants conducted by our collaborators in Maastricht, we investigated the role of early visual cortices for the processing of facial trustworthiness. To that end, processing in early visual cortices in adults was interrupted using so-called trans-cranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Even when TMS was applied, participants showed comparable behavioural judgements…

Finally – we have the first results from our odor study. We invited 91 babies (and their moms) from Lübeck and the surrounding area to the lab to test how the mother’s familiar scent would impact the babies’ response to emotional, in particular fearful, faces. 7-month-olds typically show an enhanced EEG response to fearful faces,…

Our first study from Lübeck! And it’s a more methods-oriented project. Most EEG studies in infants rely on the analysis of so-called event-related brain potentials (ERPs), meaning that we need to show the babies a large number of very similar pictures (or sounds) in order to be able to then compute mean brain response to…

In prior studies, we could show that infants process faces perceived by adults as particularly trustworthy different from those that were judged by adults as less trustworthy. In our new study, we investigated whether infants make use of this trustworthiness information and process objects differently, depending on whether a face looking at that object looks…

Nothing related to infants or social development, for a change. Bernadette’s new paper on the role of the IFJ (inferior frontal junction) for the interplay between cognitive control and motivation is out! So, in the manuscript she is investigating, how this brain region, the IFJ, might be involved in the observation that we are better…