Dr. MARLEN ROEHE

 

 

 

 

 

Finished project

Measures of Content and Dynamics of Anticipation in the Brain

The environment we live in is highly dynamic and yet it presents us with continuous sensory regularities. This allows us to implicitly and explicitly extract regularities and associations from our environment and establish internal representations of the external world (Clark, 2013). Once these representations are built to form a hierarchical generative model, temporal regularities can be anticipated through top-down predictions. Meaning, less time and attention is required to process these sensory stimuli. Neurophysiological accounts postulate that these top-down predictions are represented by beta/alpha oscillation dominance, whilst feedforward projection of novel information is represented by dominating gamma oscillations (Cao et al., 2017). Furthermore, to optimise the bidirectional information transfer, this interplay of oscillations does not occur simultaneously but is instead segregated into periods of either dominating beta/alpha or dominating gamma oscillations (Fontolan et al., 2014). Yet, what remains speculative is the generation process of implicit predictions, i.e. we know little about the electrophysiological nature outlining the build-up of predictions and how these predictions are influenced by the constant stream of competing interoceptive and exteroceptive input. With this study we therefore intend to investigate the electrophysiological insights into the nature of predictions underlying visual statistical learning.

References

Cao, L., Thut, G., & Gross, J. (2017). The role of brain oscillations in predicting self-generated sounds. NeuroImage, 147, 895-903.

Clark A. (2013). Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behav Brains Sci, 36, 181-204.

Fontolan, L., Morillon, B., Liegeois-Chauvel, C., & Giraud, A.-L. (2014). The contribution of frequency-specific activity to hierarchical information processing in the human auditory cortex. Nature Communications, 5, 1-10.

 

Publications

Roehe, M.A., Kluger, D.,  Schubotz, R.I. (2023) Fluctuations in alpha and beta power provide neural states favourable for contextually relevant anticipatory processes. European Journal of Neuroscience (in press)

Roehe, M.A., Kluger, D.S., Schroeder, S.C.Y., Schliephake, L.M., Boelte, J., Jacobsen, T., Schubotz., R.I. (2021). Early alpha/beta oscillations reflect the formation of face-related expectations in the brain. PLoS ONE 16(7): e0255116

Schliephake, L.,Trempler, I., Roehe, M.A., Heins, N., Schubotz,R.I. (2021). Positive and negative prediction error signals to violated expectations of face and place stimuli distinctively activate FFA and PPA. NeuroImage, 236 (2021) 118028

Kluger, D.S, Broers, N., Roehe, M. A, Wurm, M.F., Busch, N. A., Schubotz, R.I. (2020) Exploitation of local and global information in predictive processing. PLOS ONE, 15(4):e0231021, doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231021

 

Current Position

Post-Doc in the Research Unit for Curriculum Development, Medical University of Vienna