Falko Mecklenbrauck, MSC

phd student
Institut für Psychologie
Fliednerstraße 21
D-48149 Münster
room Fl 310 b
phone: +49 (0) 251 / 83 34101

Academic CV

since 2020
Researcher and doctoral student at the Institute for Psychology at WWU Münster, Department of Biological Psychology
2018 – 2020
M. Sc. Psychology, WWU Münster
Master thesis: Through the Eyes of Autism – Action Perception and Recognition in Autism Spectrum Condition
2018 – 2020
Student assistant at the Institute for Psychology, WWU Münster, Department of Biological Psychology
2018 – 2019
Student assistant, Clinic for Neurology, EK Unna, Neuropsychology
2016 – 2020
Student assistant at the Institute for Psychology, WWU Münster, Department of Statistics and Psychological Methods
2015 – 2018
B. Sc. Psychology, WWU Münster
Bachelor Thesis: The Art of Deduction – The Influence of Contextual Objects in the Recognition & Interpretation of Actions

Academic Interests

Action and goal representations in the prefrontal cortex
Cortical hierarchies
Action processing in Autism Spectrum Condition

Conference Contributions

Mecklenbrauck, F., Gruber, M., Siestrup, S., Grotegerd, D., Mauritz, M., Zahedi, A., Trempler, I., Dannlowski, U., Schubotz, R. I. (2023, März) The Significance of Structural Rich Club Hubs for the Processing of Hierarchical Stimuli. Poster at the 65. Confernce of Experiemental Psychologists (TeaP). Trier, Germany.

Mecklenbrauck, F., Gruber, M., Siestrup, S., Grotegerd, D., Mauritz, M., Zahedi, A., Trempler, I., Dannlowski, U., Schubotz, R. I. (2023, Juli) The Significance of Structural Rich Club Hubs for the Processing of Hierarchical Stimuli. Poster at the Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM). Montréal, Canada.

Project

Rich club “chronoarchitecture” forms the neural basis for the processing of hierarchical stimuli

Not only the world around us consist of a multitude of nested and non-nested hierarchical structures, but also our brain can be described in the ways of structural and functional hierarchies. Thus, it has been theorized that the neural processing of hierarchical stimuli also behaves in a hierarchical manner. Evidence from cytoarchitectural and frequency analysis studies as well as various theories of frontal lobe functions proposed an anterior-posterior hierarchy of processing steps (e.g. Badre & Nee, 2018). However, the question remains, which organizational principle structures the stimuli hierarchically. A promising approach we want to focus on in project is the temporal persistence of stimuli. Areas near the top of the hierarchy are able to integrate and maintain information over a longer span of time (Koechlin & Summerfield, 2007). The structural backbone of this temporal hierarchy might be constructed by the rich club organization of the cerebral network. Following this idea, hierarchically higher thus more stable processing near a rich club hub and hierarchically lower, more transient processing closer to more peripheral nodes, could build an axis of “chronoarchitecture” (Gollo et al., 2015) which possibly offers a very general theory of information processing. Therefore, we will combine function magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and graph theoretical analyses to connect the functional processes to the network architecture. In the first experiment, the participants will be presented sequences of numbers, that contain hierarchical structures of different level and length. This paradigm will be applied to determine “temporal receptive windows” (Hasson et al., 2008) of different cortical areas which will then be mapped onto the furthermore identified structural network to address relation of hierarchical stimuli, their temporal persistence, and the underlying neural organization.

References
Badre, D., & Nee, D. E. (2018). Frontal Cortex and the Hierarchical Control of Behavior. In Trends in Cognitive Sciences (Vol. 22, Issue 2, pp. 170–188). Elsevier Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2017.11.005

Gollo, L. L., Zalesky, A., Matthew Hutchison, R., Van Den Heuvel, M., & Breakspear, M. (2015). Dwelling quietly in the rich club: Brain network determinants of slow cortical fluctuations. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 370(1668). https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0165

Hasson, U., Yang, E., Vallines, I., Heeger, D. J., & Rubin, N. (2008). A hierarchy of temporal receptive windows in human cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 28(10), 2539–2550. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5487-07.2008

Koechlin, E., & Summerfield, C. (2007). An information theoretical approach to prefrontal executive function. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(6), 229–235. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2007.04.005