Laura Quante Institute of Psychology Fliednerstraße 21 D-48149 Münster Phone: +49 (0) 251/83 34131 Fax.: +49 (0) 251/83 34104 Email: l.quante@uni-muenster.de Website

Joined OCC in 2015

Research Project

State-to-state transitions of the connectome: electrophysiology and brain imaging
In global brain communication, tendencies of segregation and integration exist. In this context, segregation means that specific brain regions work independently and perform specialized functions. Integration describes a global coupling and coordination of different regions and, thus, specialized functions (Sporns, 2013). Both tendencies are necessary to enable complex behavior (Tognoli & Kelso, 2014). It is assumed that the brain contains a connective core (also called rich club) – a small set of topologically central and strongly interconnected nodes (Shanahan, 2012; van den Heuvel et al., 2012). These nodes coordinate the interplay of parallel processing of functionally specialized regions and, consequently, continuously integrate and segregate information of these regions. The alternation of integration and segregation leads to state-to-state transitions, resulting in a succession of specific brain states (Shanahan, 2012).
During my PhD I would like to focus on whether and how integration and segregation are neuronally realized. For that, I am going to use electrophysiological (EEG) and brain imaging techniques (fMRI).

References
Shanahan, M. (2012). The brain's connective core and its role in animal cognition. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 367(1603), 2704–2714.
Sporns, O. (2013). Network attributes for segregation and integration in the human brain. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 23(2), 162–171.
Tognoli, E., & Kelso, J. A. Scott. (2014). The Metastable Brain. Neuron, 81(1), 35–48.
van den Heuvel, Martijn P, Kahn, R. S., Goñi, J., & Sporns, O. (2012). High-cost, high-capacity backbone for global brain communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109(28), 11372–11377.

PhD Committee

Prof. Dr. Ricarda Schubotz
Prof. Dr. Pienie Zwitserlood
Dr. Matthias Ekman

Publications

Quante, L., Kluger, D. S., Bürkner, P. C., Ekman, M., & Schubotz, R. I. (2018). Graph measures in task-based fMRI: Functional integration during read-out of visual and auditory information. PloS one, 13(11), e0207119.

Quante, L., Bölte, J., & Zwitserlood, P. (2018). Dissociating predictability, plausibility and possibility of sentence continuations in reading: evidence from late-positivity ERPs. PeerJ, 6, e5717.

DeLong, K. A., Quante, L., & Kutas, M. (2014). Predictability, plausibility, and two late ERP positivities during written sentence comprehension. Neuropsychologia, 61, 150–162.

CV