GSC 86:  Berlin School of Mind and Brain

• Subject Area: Psychology ; Neurosciences ; Philosophy ; Linguistics
• Term: from 2006 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 24184485

• Final Report Year: 2020

Final Report Abstract

Central questions about the human mind − including perception and consciousness, language, cognitive development, and mental disorders − can only be addressed through the cooperation of various disciplines such as philosophy, linguistics, computer science, psychology and neuroscience. Ever since the Berlin School of Mind and Brain (M&B) was successful in the first round of the Excellence Initiative, the graduate school's three-year English-language doctoral program has prepared students for challenging interdisciplinary research tasks and has achieved numerous successes that have been widely recognized both nationally and internationally. Having received another award in the 2012 round of the Excellence competition, M&B included the new research topic social cognition, established a two-year English-language Master's program, and set up a unique postdoctoral program with research funding and numerous career development measures for almost 40 postdoctoral researchers (completed in 2019). The M&B doctoral program and the Master’s program will be continued with the support of HU Berlin after funding by the Excellence Initiative has ended. Since 2006, 85 doctoral candidates have graduated from the M&B program, 69 (= 80%) with an average thesis completion time of 3.2 years. The drop-out rate is very low at 6.5%. Currently, the school has 67 active doctoral members. Candidates and alumni have published several hundred own papers in the most important journals and publishing houses and have achieved outstanding positions in the scientific community: 5 alumni have been appointed to regular professorships, 7 to group leader positions, many more to postdoctoral positions world-wide. It can be stated that after 13 years our original goal has been achieved and M&B has become central to the close networking in the Berlin metropolitan area of university (HU, TU and FU Berlin, U Potsdam, U Magdeburg, U Leipzig), clinical (Charité) and non-university research (Max Planck Institutes Berlin/Leipzig). Consequently, in January 2017, M&B was awarded the first prize as "Einstein Doctoral Programme" by the Einstein Foundation Berlin. After Excellence Initiative funding has expired, M&B receives substantial basic funding from HU Berlin. In addition, we started new research initiatives quite a while ago all of which have turned out successful. Among them are the Einstein Center for Neurosciences and the Cluster of Excellence 2002 Science of Intelligence (SCIoI) (TU/HU Berlin) -- M&B is setting up and managing the graduate school within the cluster. M&B members made a successful bid for Research Training Group 2386 "Extrospection”, and M&B is one of the hosting institutions for doctoral candidates and fast-track students of the new Max Planck School of Cognition. Finally, M&B is in the process of establishing an Einstein Profile Professorship “Social Intelligence” which will strengthen links with SCIoI and ensure the teaching for our Master’s program.

Link to the final report

https://dx.doi.org/10.2314/GBV:1697094120

Publications

• (2009). Processing of expected values in human visual cortex. (Dissertation TU Berlin)
  Kallerhoff, P.
  
• (2010). Altered representation of expected value in the orbitofrontal cortex in mania. Human brain mapping, 31(7), 958-969
  Bermpohl, F., Kahnt, T., Dalanay, U., Hägele, C., Sajonz, B., Wegner, T., ... & Ströhle, A.
  
• (2010). Do we really gesture more when it is more difficult?. Cognitive Science, 34(4), 643-664
  Sassenberg, U., & Van Der Meer, E.
  
• (2010). Prefrontal cortex fails to learn from reward prediction errors in alcohol dependence. Journal of Neuroscience, 30(22), 7749-7753
  Park, S. Q., Kahnt, T., Beck, A., Cohen, M. X., Dolan, R. J., Wrase, J., & Heinz, A.
  
• (2010). The neural code of reward anticipation in human orbitofrontal cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(13), 6010-6015
  Kahnt, T., Heinzle, J., Park, S. Q., & Haynes, J. D.
  
• (2011). Causal role of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in human perceptual decision making. Current Biology, 21(11), 980-983
  Philiastides, M. G., Auksztulewicz, R., Heekeren, H. R., & Blankenburg, F.
  
• (2011). Contralateral delay activity reveals lifespan age differences in topdown modulation of working memory contents. Cerebral Cortex, 21, 2809-2819
  Sander, M. C., Werkle-Bergner, M., & Lindenberger, U.
  
• (2011). How unrealistic optimism is maintained in the face of reality. Nature neuroscience, 14(11), 1475-1479
  Sharot, T., Korn, C. W., & Dolan, R. J.
  
• (2011). Imagery and perception share cortical representations of content and location. Cerebral Cortex, bhr106
  Cichy, R. M., Heinzle, J., & Haynes, J. D.
  
• (2011). Kognitive Fähigkeiten als Bedingung moralischer Verantwortung. Königshausen & Neumann
  Engel, M.
  
• (2011). Lifespan age differences in working memory: Insights from behavioral and electrophysiological markers of capacity and selectivity. Doctoral dissertation, Humboldt- Universität zu Berlin, Germany
  Sander, M. C.
  
• (2011). Perceptual learning and decision-making in human medial frontal cortex. Neuron, 70(3), 549-559
  Kahnt, T., Grueschow, M., Speck, O., & Haynes, J. D.
  
• (2011). Visuoauditory mappings between high luminance and high pitch are shared by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(51), 20661-20665
  Ludwig, V. U., Adachi, I., & Matsuzawa, T.
  
• Emotion effects in visual language processing (Dissertation HU Berlin)
  Bayer, Mareike
  
• (2012) Human anterior prefrontal cortex encodes the 'what' and 'when' of future intentions. Neuroimage. 61: 139-48
  Momennejad I, Haynes JD
  
• (2012). A direct oculomotor correlate of unconscious visual processing. Current Biology, 22(13), R514-R515
  Rothkirch, M., Stein, T., Sekutowicz, M., & Sterzer, P.
  
• (2012). Adaptive coding of reward prediction errors is gated by striatal coupling. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(11), 4285-4289
  Park, S. Q., Kahnt, T., Talmi, D., Rieskamp, J., Dolan, R. J., & Heekeren, H. R.
  
• (2012). Changes in neural connectivity underlie decision threshold modulation for reward maximization. The Journal of Neuroscience, 32(43), 14942-14950
  Green, N., Biele, G. P., & Heekeren, H. R.
  
• (2012). Concepts or metacognition– What is the issue? Commentary on Stephane Savanah’s “The concept possession hypothesis of self-consciousness”. Consciousness and cognition, 21(2), 721-722
  Musholt, K.
  
• (2012). Connectivity-based parcellation of the human orbitofrontal cortex. The Journal of Neuroscience, 32(18), 6240-6250
  Kahnt, T., Chang, L. J., Park, S. Q., Heinzle, J., & Haynes, J. D.
  
• (2012). Dysfunctional forward model mechanisms and aberrant sense of agency in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Biological psychiatry, 71(7), 652-659
  Gentsch, A., Schütz-Bosbach, S., Endrass, T., & Kathmann, N.
  
• (2012). Lifespan age differences in working memory: A two-component framework. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 36, 2007-2033
  Sander, M. C., Lindenberger, U., & Werkle- Bergner, M.
  
• (2012). Positively biased processing of self-relevant social feedback. Journal of Neuroscience, 32(47), 16832-16844
  Korn, C. W., Prehn, K., Park, S. Q., Walter, H., & Heekeren, H. R.
  
• (2012). Recurrent neural processing and somatosensory awareness. The Journal of Neuroscience, 32(3), 799-805
  Auksztulewicz, R., Spitzer, B., & Blankenburg, F.
  
• (2012). S Choudhury, J Slaby (eds). The salmon of doubt. Critical neuroscience: A handbook of the social and cultural contexts of neuroscience. Wiley. 273-285
  Margulies, D. S.
  
• (2012). What visual information is processed in the human dorsal stream?. The Journal of Neuroscience, 32(24), 8107-8109
  Hebart, M. N., & Hesselmann, G.
  
• (2013). A philosophical perspective on the relation between cortical midline structures and the self. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 7
  Musholt, K.
  
• (2013). Altered contextual modulation of primary visual cortex responses in schizophrenia. Neuropsychopharmacology, 38( 13), 2607
  Seymour, K., Stein, T., Sanders, L. L. O., Guggenmos, M., Theophil, I., & Sterzer, P.
  
• (2013). Brain networks for language: Anatomy and functional roles of neural pathways supporting language comprehension and repetition (Doctoral dissertation, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences Leipzig)
  Gierhan, S. M.
  
• (2013). Distinct parietal and temporal connectivity profiles of ventrolateral frontal areas involved in language production. Journal of Neuroscience, 33(42), 16846-16852
  Margulies, D. S., & Petrides, M.
  
• (2013). Encoding of prospective tasks in the human prefrontal cortex under varying task loads. The Journal of Neuroscience, 33(44), 17342-17349
  Momennejad, I., & Haynes, J. D.
  
• (2013). Essays in experimental and neuroeconomics. Dissertation, HU 2013
  Gerhardt, H.
  
• (2013). Reduction of influence of task difficulty on perceptual decision making by STN deep brain stimulation. Current Biology, 23(17), 1681-1684
  Green, N., Bogacz, R., Huebl, J., Beyer, A. K., Kühn, A. A., & Heekeren, H. R.
  
• (2013). Self-consciousness and nonconceptual content. Philosophical studies, 163(3), 649-672
  Musholt, K.
  
• (2013). Subjective Rating of Weak Tactile Stimuli Is Parametrically Encoded in Event-Related Potentials. The Journal of Neuroscience, 33(29), 11878-11887
  Auksztulewicz, R., & Blankenburg, F.
  
• (2014) Pyramidal and stellate cell specificity of grid and border representations in layer 2 of medial entorhinal cortex. Neuron 84 (6): 1191-1197
  Tang, Q., Burgalossi, A., Ebbesen, C. L., Ray, S., Naumann, R., Schmidt, H., Spicher, D., & Brecht, M.
  
• (2014) The representation of social facial touch in rat barrel cortex. Curr Biol 24(1):109-15
  Bobrov E, Wolfe J, Rao RP, Brecht M
  
• (2014). Adenosine Sheds Light on the Relationship between Alcohol and Sleep. The Journal of Neuroscience, 34(23), 7733-7734
  Wiers, C. E.
  
• (2014). Beautiful friendship: social sharing of emotions improves subjective feelings and activates the neural reward circuitry. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 10(6), 801-808
  Wagner, U., Galli, L., Schott, B. H., Wold, A., van der Schalk, J., Manstead, A. S., ... & Walter, H.
  
• (2014). Disentangling neural representations of value and salience in the human brain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(13), 5000-5005
  Kahnt, T., Park, S. Q., Haynes, J. D., & Tobler, P. N.
  
• (2014). Hippocampal and frontolimbic function as intermediate phenotype for psychosis: evidence from healthy relatives and a common risk variant in CACNA1C. Biological psychiatry, 76(6), 466-475
  Erk, S., Meyer-Lindenberg, A., Schmierer, P., Mohnke, S., Grimm, O., Garbusow, M., ... & Tost, H.
  
• (2014). Neural correlates of alcohol-approach bias in alcohol addiction: the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak for spirits. Neuropsychopharmacology, 39(3), 688-697
  Wiers, C. E., Stelzel, C., Park, S. Q., Gawron, C. K., Ludwig, V. U., Gutwinski, S., ... & Bermpohl, F.
  
• (2014). Tactile and visual motion direction processing in hMT+/V5. NeuroImage, 84, 420-427
  van Kemenade, B. M., Seymour, K., Wacker, E., Spitzer, B., Blankenburg, F., & Sterzer, P.
  
• (2014). The interaction between prefrontal cortex and reward system in pathological gambling: evidence from neuroscientific data. (Dissertation HU Berlin)
  Quester, S.
  
• (2014). The neural code for face orientation in the human fusiform face area. Journal of Neuroscience, 34(36), 12155-12167
  Ramírez, F. M., Cichy, R. M., Allefeld, C., & Haynes, J. D.
  
• (2014). The neural representation of voluntary task-set selection in dynamic environments. Cerebral Cortex, 25(12), 4715-4726
  Wisniewski, D., Reverberi, C., Tusche, A., & Haynes, J. D.
  
• (2014). The relationship between perceptual decision variables and confidence in the human brain. Cerebral Cortex, 26(1), 118-130
  Hebart, M. N., Schriever, Y., Donner, T. H., & Haynes, J. D.
  
• (2014). Vocalization–whisking coordination and multisensory integration of social signals in rat auditory cortex. eLife 3:e03185
  Rao, R.P., Mielke, F., Bobrov, E., Brecht, M.
  
• (2015) Causal Influence of Articulatory Motor Cortex on Comprehending Single Spoken Words: TMS Evidence. Cereb Cortex 25 (10): 3894-3902
  Schomers, M.R., Kirilina, E., Weigand, A., Bajbouj, M., & Pulvermüller, F.
  
• (2015) The language skeleton after dissecting meaning: A functional segregation within Broca's Area. NeuroImage 114: 294-302
  Goucha, T., & Friederici, A.D.
  
• (2015). Effects of cognitive bias modification training on neural alcohol cue reactivity in alcohol dependence. American Journal of Psychiatry, 172(4), 335-343
  Wiers, C. E., Stelzel, C., Gladwin, T. E., Park, S. Q., Pawelczack, S., Gawron, C. K., ... & Lindenmeyer, J.
  
• (2015). Electrophysiological correlates of observational learning in children. Developmental Science
  Rodriguez Buritica, J. M., Eppinger, B., Schuck, N. W., Heekeren, H. R., & Li, S.C.
  
• (2015). Functional connectivity of visual cortex in the blind follows retinotopic organization principles. Brain, 138(6), 1679-1695
  Striem-Amit, E., Ovadia-Caro, S., Caramazza, A., Margulies, D. S., Villringer, A., & Amedi, A.
  
• (2015). Motivation by potential gains and losses affects control processes via different mechanisms in the attentional network. Neuroimage, 111, 549-561
  Paschke, L. M., Walter, H., Steimke, R., Ludwig, V. U., Gaschler, R., Schubert, T., & Stelzel, C.
  
• (2015). Network activity underlying the illusory self‐ attribution of a dummy arm. Human brain mapping, 36(6), 2284-2304
  Limanowski, J., & Blankenburg, F.
  
• (2015). Thinking about Oneself: From Nonconceptual Content to the Concept of a Self. MIT Press
  Musholt, K.
  
• (2016) Maternal Exposure to Childhood Trauma Is Associated During Pregnancy With Placental-Fetal Stress Physiology. Biological Psychiatry 79 (10): 831-839
  Moog, N. K., Buss, C., Entringer, S., Shahbaba, B., Gillen, D. L., Hobel, C. J., & Wadhwa, P. D.
  
• (2016). Aberrant salience is related to dysfunctional self-referential processing in psychosis. Schizophrenia Bulletin 42 (1): 67-76
  Pankow, A., Katthagen, T., Diner, S., Deserno, L., Boehme, R., Kathmann, N., Gleich, T., Gaebler, M., Walter, H., Heinz, A., & Schlagenhauf, F.
  
• (2016). Brain-electric correlates of visual word recognition under natural reading conditions
  Niefind, F.
  
• (2016). Cognitive Conflicts in the Stroop Paradigm: Information Retrieval and Response Selection in the Human Cognitive System (Doctoral dissertation, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
  Bohle, H.
  
• (2016). Degrees of Subjective Certainty: Processing and Representation (Doctoral dissertation)
  Heereman, J.
  
• (2016). Individual differences in self-reported self-control predict successful emotion regulation. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Volume 11, Issue 8, August 2016, Pages 1193–1204
  Lena M. Paschke, Denise Dörfel, Rosa Steimke, Ima Trempler, Amadeus Magrabi, Vera U. Ludwig, Torsten Schubert, Christine Stelzel, Henrik Walter
  
• (2016). Influence of interpersonal abilities on social decisions and their physiological correlates
  Kaltwasser, L.
  
• (2016). Is the sensorimotor cortex relevant for speech perception and understanding? An integrative review. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 10
  Schomers, M. R., & Pulvermüller, F.
  
• (2016). Probing Sensory Perception in Multiple Dimensions: The Development of Real-world Environment and Optical Tracking Methods for Head-fixed Mice (Doctoral dissertation, Lebenswissenschaftliche Fakultät)
  Nashaat, M.
  
• (2016). The Neural Basis of Altered Self-experiences in Patients with Schizophrenia and Healthy Individuals (Doctoral dissertation, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
  Klock, L.
  
• (2016). The temporal interplay of vision and eye movements
  Kovalenko, L.
  
• Breaking down complexity: The neural basis of the syntactic merge mechanism in the human brain. (Dissertation, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig)
  Zaccarella, E.
  
• Plasticity following stroke: The recovery of functional networks as measured by resting-state functional connectivity. Dissertation, 97 S., Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig (2016) ISBN: 978-3-941504-65-3
  Ovadia-Caro, S.
  
• (2017). A revival of the Homo loquens as a builder of labeled structures: neurocognitive considerations. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
  Goucha, T., Zaccarella, E., & Friederici, A. D.
  
• (2017). Brain connections of words, perceptions and actions: a neurobiological model of spatio-temporal semantic activation in the human cortex. Neuropsychologia, 98, 111-129
  Tomasello, R., Garagnani, M., Wennekers, T., & Pulvermüller, F.
  
• (2017). Connectomes as constitutively epistemic objects: Critical perspectives on modeling in current neuroanatomy. In Progress in brain research (Vol. 233, pp. 149-177). Elsevier
  Haueis, P., & Slaby, J.
  
• (2017). Embodiment, context-sensitivity, and discrete emotions: A response to Moors. Psychological Inquiry, 28(1), 31-38
  Eickers, G., Loaiza, J. R., & Prinz, J.
  
• (2017). Implicit and explicit false belief development in preschool children. Developmental Science, 20(5), e12445
  Grosse Wiesmann, C., Friederici, A. D., Singer, T., & Steinbeis, N.
  
• (2017). Intergenerational effect of maternal exposure to childhood maltreatment on newborn brain anatomy. Biological Psychiatry
  Styner, M., Gilmore, J. H., Kathmann, N., ... & Buss, C.
  
• (2017). Internal and external attention and the default mode network. NeuroImage, 148, 381-389
  Scheibner, H. J., Bogler, C., Gleich, T., Haynes, J. D., & Bermpohl, F.
  
• (2017). Motor cortex—to act or not to act?. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 18(11), 694
  Ebbesen, C. L., & Brecht, M.
  
• (2017). Neural correlates of semantic prediction and resolution in sentence processing. Journal of Neuroscience, 37(18), 4848-4858
  Grisoni, L., Miller, T. M., & Pulvermüller, F.
  
• (2017). Neurocomputational consequences of evolutionary connectivity changes in perisylvian language cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 37(11), 3045-3055
  Schomers, M. R., Garagnani, M., & Pulvermüller, F.
  
• (2017). Social cognition in aggressive offenders: Impaired empathy, but intact theory of mind. Scientific reports, 7(1), 670
  Winter, K., Spengler, S., Bermpohl, F., Singer, T., & Kanske, P.
  
• (2017). Vibrissa motor cortex activity suppresses contralateral whisking behavior. Nature neuroscience, 20(1), 82-89
  Ebbesen, C. L., Doron, G., Lenschow, C., & Brecht, M.
  
• (2017). White matter maturation is associated with the emergence of Theory of Mind in early childhood. Nature communications, 8, 14692
  Wiesmann, C. G., Schreiber, J., Singer, T., Steinbeis, N., & Friederici, A. D.
  
• (2018). Blunted cortisol stress reactivity in low–income children relates to lower memory function. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 90, 110-121
  Raffington, L., Prindle, J., Keresztes, A., Binder, J., Heim, C., & Shing, Y. L.
  
• (2018). Cortical specialization for attended versus unattended working memory. Nature neuroscience, 21(4), 494
  Christophel, T. B., Iamshchinina, P., Yan, C., Allefeld, C., & Haynes, J. D.
  
• (2018). Developmental Differences in Social Learning (Doctoral dissertation, Freie Universität Berlin)
  Buritica, J. M. R.
  
• (2018). Functional segregation of basal ganglia pathways in Parkinson’s disease. Brain, 141(9), 2655-2669
  Neumann, W. J., Schroll, H., de Almeida Marcelino, A. L., Horn, A., Ewert, S., Irmen, F., ... & Kühn, A. A.
  
• (2018). Group-Level EEG-Processing Pipeline for Flexible Single Trial-Based Analyses Including Linear Mixed Models. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 12(48), 1-15
  Frömer, R., Maier, M., & Abdel Rahman, R.
  
• (2018). Native Language Promotes Access to Visual Consciousness. Psychological Science, 29(11), 1757–1772
  Maier, M., & Abdel Rahman, R.
  
• (2018). Recognizing visual speech: Reduced responses in visual-movement regions, but not other speech regions in autism. NeuroImage: Clinical, 20, 1078-1091
  Borowiak, K., Schelinski, S., & von Kriegstein, K.
  
• (2018). Socioeconomic disparities in children’s cognitive development: Longitudinal dynamics and stress mechanisms
  Raffington, L.
  
• (2018). The emergence of theory of mind: Cognitive and neural basis of false belief understanding in preschool age (Doctoral dissertation, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences Leipzig)
  Grosse Wiesmann, C.
  
• (2018). Verbal labels facilitate tactile perception. Cognition, 171, 172-179
  Miller, T. M., Schmidt, T. T., Blankenburg, F., & Pulvermüller, F.
  
• (2019). Brain mechanisms of language and semantic processing in sighted and congenitally blind populations: a neurobiologically constrained model (Doctoral dissertation)
  Tomasello, R.
  
• (2019). Conciliating language differences with universal competence in brain structure and function (Doctoral dissertation, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences Leipzig)
  Goucha, T., van der Meer, E., Friederici, A. D., & Carreiras, M.
  
• (2019). Multiple mechanisms link prestimulus neural oscillations to sensory responses. Elife, 8, e43620
  Iemi, L., Busch, N. A., Laudini, A., Haegens, S., Samaha, J., Villringer, A., & Nikulin, V. V.
  
• (2019). Neuronal correlates of label facilitated tactile perception. Scientific reports, 9(1), 1606
  Schmidt, T. T., Miller, T. M., Blankenburg, F., & Pulvermüller, F.
  
• (2019). No matter how: Top-down effects of verbal and semantic category knowledge on early visual perception. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience
  Maier, M., & Abdel Rahman, R.
  
• (2019). Parametric Working Memory of Abstract Quantities on Multiple Modalities and Formats: from Frequency to Numerosity (Doctoral dissertation)
  luc, I.
  
• (2019). Stress effects on emotional memory in middle childhood. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 100, S46-S47
  Raffington, L., Falck, J., Heim, C., Mather, M., & Shing, Y. L.
  
• (2019). The impact of ischemic stroke on connectivity gradients. NeuroImage: Clinical, 24, 101947
  Bayrak, Ş., Khalil, A. A., Villringer, K., Fiebach, J. B., Villringer, A., Margulies, D. S., & Ovadia-Caro, S.