Alumni Talk Series: Soyoung Q Park (Lübeck) and Mareike Bayer (Berlin)
Soyoung Q Park was a member of doctoral cohort 2008–2011. She is now a professor for social psychology and decision neuroscience at the Institute of Psychology, University of Lübeck. Soyoung will sepak about “The motives and modulators of decision making”. Abstract: What drives us to trust someone we have just met? Why do we decide to eat spaghetti for lunch? Researches from different disciplines have attempted to investigate the underlying motives of decisions. Humans tend to believe that decisions are made based on rational thoughts, it is surprising how irrational motives and modulators are guiding our decisions. Here, I will present a series of recent studies from my lab, in which we shed light on the psychological, neural and metabolic motives and modulators of human decision making. Mareike Bayer was a member of doctoral cohort 2008–2011. She is now a postdoctoral researcher in the Social Cognition group with Isabel Dziobek at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain. Mareike will speak about “Emotion, reward, and personal relevance – emotional and motivational influences on visual processing. Evidence from ERPs and simultaneous EEG-fMRI”. Abstract: Among a constant flood of sensory information, the things we care most about – a fearful face, or a familiar voice – stand out. My research focuses on the impact of emotional and personally relevant information on processing in the visual cortex, and uses ERPs and simultaneous EEG-fMRI to quantify brain activity with a high temporal and spatial resolution. I will present data that shows how emotional content across different stimulus domains (including language, facial expressions, and symbolic stimuli) can very rapidly modulate activity generated in the striate and extrastriate visual cortex. Furthermore, I will present data that elucidates the role of personal relevance of a stimulus on emotion processing in language and face perception, for example when seeing one’s partner’s face compared to a stranger. Finally, I will show how, through the use of simultaneous EEG-fMRI, we are able to investigate the impact of early visual processing in the striate/extrastriate visual cortex on higher-order processing stages as well as attentional gating of these effects over time. Taken together, these lines of research aim at identifying pathways of emotion and personal relevance, and their role in social interaction both in neurotypical functioning and in Autism spectrum disorder. All are welcome.
