Benjamin Jainta, MSC

phd student
Institut für Psychologie
Fliednerstraße 21
D-48149 Münster
room Fl 316
phone: +49 (0) 251 / 83 34164

ACADEMIC CV

Since 2019
Researcher and doctoral student, University of Münster

2017 – 2019
Psychology Master of Science, University of Würzburg
Master thesis: The influence of transcranial ultrasound on frontal brain activation in a virtual reality.

2017-2018
Research assistant, Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Plastic Surgery, University Hospital Würzburg

2016
Psychology Bachelor of Science, University of Warsaw

2013-2015
Research assistant, Social Psychology, University of Würzburg

2012 – 2017
Psychology Bachelor of Science, University of Würzburg
Bachelor thesis: Frontal asymmetry and startle reflex in women with arachnophobia

Academic Interests

episodic memory
action observation
fMRI, EEG

Publications

Siestrup S., Jainta B., Cheng S., Schubotz R.I. (2022) Solidity meets surprise: Cerebral and behavioral effects of learning from episodic prediction errors. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 35:2, pp. 291–313. doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_01948

Jainta, B., Siestrup, S., El-Sourani, N., Trempler, I., Wurm, M.F., Werning, M., Cheng, S., Schubotz, R.I. (2021) Seeing what I did (not): Cerebral and behavioral effects of agency and perspective on episodic memory re-activation. Front. Behav. Neurosci. 15:793115. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2021.793115

Siestrup, S., Jainta., B., El-Sourani, N., Trempler, I., Wurm, M. F., Wolf, O. T., Cheng, S., & Schubotz, R. I. (2022) What happened when? Cerebral processing of modified structure and content in episodic cueing. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, in press

Conference Contributions

Jainta, B., Siestrup, S., El-Sourani, N., Trempler, I., Wurm, M.F., Werning, M., Cheng, S., Schubotz, R.I. (2022) Seeing what I did (not): Cerebral and behavioral effects of agency and perspective on episodic memory re-activation. Poster at the 29th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. San Francisco, USA.

Jainta, B., Siestrup, S., El-Sourani, N., Trempler, I., Wurm, M.F., Werning, M., Cheng, S., Schubotz, R.I. (2022) When I (do not) see myself: The role of agency and perspective in episodic memory. Talk at the 64th Tagung experimentell arbeitender Psychologen (TeaP). Köln, Germany. (Virtual conference)

Jainta, B., Siestrup, S., Schubotz, R.I. (2021). Investigating the effect of self-perspective and self-performance on episodic memory retrieval. Talk at the Generative Episodic Memory: Interdisciplinary perspectives from neuroscience, psychology and philosophy 2021 (GEM) 2021. Bochum, Germany. (Virtual conference)

Jainta, B., Siestrup, S., Schubotz, R.I. (2021). When I see myself - The Role of Agency and Perspective in Episodic Memory Retrieval. Poster at the Generative Episodic Memory: Interdisciplinary perspectives from neuroscience, psychology and philosophy 2021 (GEM) 2021. Bochum, Germany. (Virtual conference)

Project

'Alternative facts' - How the brain warrants stable and flexible predictions from faithful and modified memories of a person's true past

In this project we aim to distinguish sequential expectations from non-sequential expectations that are driven by a cued episodic retrieval.
The basis for prediction is memory. From this perspective, memory is not autotelic, but should be optimized to serve the anticipation of upcoming events and the planning of action. This optimization entails updating when the world has truly changed. In the current project, we will trigger the recall of episodic memories either with regard to sequential expectations (based on the episodic memory trace) or with regard to non-sequential expectations (based on semantic information). In a first step, participants will be videotaped while performing and observing everyday actions. Subsequently, three experiments will be conducted using BOLD-sensitive functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to assess the cerebral basis of episodic expectation, surprise (information-theoretical: surprisal), and re-consolidation during presentation of these action videos. We employ a set of novel experimental factors concerning the episodes’ mnemonic solidity (retrieval times and consolidation) and experiential quality (self-perspective and self-performance) to test their impact on sequential and object-semantic surprise. This approach is motivated by the question as to which conditions render the memory of a truly experienced episode more or less susceptible to later modification of its spatiotemporal structure or its object-semantic content. Moreover, we systematically compare the conditions for the presence of memory updating effects due to reconsolidation separately for sequential structure and object-semantic content. Behavioral analyses will be combined with BOLD fMRI contrast, representational similarity, and graph theoretical analyses to specifically determine the role of hippocampal and selected cortical areas in stable and flexible episodic memory.

This project gets funded by the German Research Foundation (SCHU1439-10-1)