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Lutz Jäncke

Publications and source records attributed to Lutz Jäncke.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Neural correlates of a 'pessimistic' attitude when anticipating events of unknown emotional valence.

Since we do not know what future holds for us, we prepare for expected emotional events in order to deal with a pleasant or threatening environment. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense to be particularly prepared for the worst-case scenario. We were interested to evaluate whether this assumption is reflected in the central nervous information processing associated with expecting visual stimuli of unknown emotional valence. While being scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging, healthy subjects were cued to expect and then perceive visual stimuli with a known emotional valence as pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral, as well as stimuli of unknown valence that could have been either pleasant or unpleasant. While anticipating pictures of unknown valence, the activity of emotion processing brain areas was similar to activity associated with expecting unpleasant pictures, but there were no areas in which the activity was similar to the activity when expecting pleasant pictures. The activity of the revealed regions, including bilateral insula, right inferior frontal gyrus, medial thalamus, and red nucleus, further correlated with the individual ratings of mood: the worse the mood, the higher the activity. These areas are supposedly involved in a network for internal adaptation and preparation processes in order to act according to potential or certain unpleasant events. Their activity appears to reflect a 'pessimistic' bias by anticipating the events of unknown valence to be unpleasant.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

How finger tapping practice enhances efficiency of motor control.

Maximum-speed movements have been suggested to put maximum neural control demands on the primary motor cortex; hence, we are asking how primary motor cortex function changes to enable enhanced maximum movement rates induced by long-lasting practice. Cortical function was assessed by recording task-related spectral electroencephalogram alpha-power. Low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography was used to localize intracortical neuronal sources. The main result is a decrease in neural activity in the left hemisphere (ipsilateral to trained hand) from pretraining to posttraining, whereas right hemispheric activity remained constant across training. This likely reflects the initially limited capacity of the right hemisphere to control demanding left-hand movements, but also highlights its ability to become more efficient with training, indicated by reduced involvement of the left primary motor cortex after training.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Neural control of playing a reversed piano: empirical evidence for an unusual cortical organization of musical functions.

Using functional magnetic imaging techniques and neuropsychological tests, we studied a young male musician (C.S.) who performs at a professional level both on a regular piano keyboard and on a reverse keyboard (reversed right to left). The participant was left-handed, had left dominance for language but, remarkably, right dominance for the control of piano playing on both keyboards. With respect to music perception, C.S. showed left-sided activation dominance within the left superior temporal sulcus, which is normally associated with higher order auditory processing and right-sided activations in the secondary sensory cortex extending into the supramarginal gyrus. We suggest that C.S.'s pattern of functional asymmetry, characterized by audio-motor control using a right-sided network, could be a factor in his exceptional piano-playing ability on both the standard and reversed keyboard.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

The emotional power of music: how music enhances the feeling of affective pictures.

Music is an intriguing stimulus widely used in movies to increase the emotional experience. However, no brain imaging study has to date examined this enhancement effect using emotional pictures (the modality mostly used in emotion research) and musical excerpts. Therefore, we designed this functional magnetic resonance imaging study to explore how musical stimuli enhance the feeling of affective pictures. In a classical block design carefully controlling for habituation and order effects, we presented fearful and sad pictures (mostly taken from the IAPS) either alone or combined with congruent emotional musical excerpts (classical pieces). Subjective ratings clearly indicated that the emotional experience was markedly increased in the combined relative to the picture condition. Furthermore, using a second-level analysis and regions of interest approach, we observed a clear functional and structural dissociation between the combined and the picture condition. Besides increased activation in brain areas known to be involved in auditory as well as in neutral and emotional visual-auditory integration processes, the combined condition showed increased activation in many structures known to be involved in emotion processing (including for example amygdala, hippocampus, parahippocampus, insula, striatum, medial ventral frontal cortex, cerebellum, fusiform gyrus). In contrast, the picture condition only showed an activation increase in the cognitive part of the prefrontal cortex, mainly in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Based on these findings, we suggest that emotional pictures evoke a more cognitive mode of emotion perception, whereas congruent presentations of emotional visual and musical stimuli rather automatically evoke strong emotional feelings and experiences.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2006

Converging evidence of ERD/ERS and BOLD responses in motor control research.

In this chapter we summarize findings of our group in which we studied the neural underpinnings of finger tapping control using different methods (functional magnetic resonance imaging: fMRI, electroencephalography: EEG, transcranial magnetic stimulation: TMS, and behavioural experiments). First, we found that maximum finger tapping speed is a matter of training as shown for professional musicians. Secondly, we demonstrated that different finger tapping speeds are accompanied by different hemodynamic responses in the primary hand motor area (M1), the cerebellum and partly in pre-motor areas. With increasing tapping speed there is an increase of hemodynamic response in these areas (rate effect). Thirdly, the effect measured with fMRI is substantiated by rate effects measured by means of task-related power decreases in the upper alpha-band (10-12 Hz) over the primary motor cortex. In case of sequential finger movement learning, we observed decreases in task-related alpha-power in lateral PMC (event-related desynchronization: ERD) and simultaneous alpha-power increases in SMA (event-related synchronization: ERS) that came along with training-induced increases in movement rate. This pattern is discussed in relation to the "focal ERD/surround ERS" phenomenon suggested by Pfurtscheller and Lopes da Silva. Finally, we demonstrated that finger tapping speed was slowed by selectively inhibiting the primary hand motor area using TMS. Taken together, these studies demonstrate on the basis of converging evidence that the primary hand motor area is the basic control centre for controlling the movement parameter tapping speed. However, the neural efficiency to control finger tapping speed (as measured with hemodynamic responses or ERD/ERS patterns) is a matter of training.

Animals↗
PubMed2006

Neural correlate of spatial presence in an arousing and noninteractive virtual reality: an EEG and psychophysiology study.

Using electroencephalography (EEG), psychophysiology, and psychometric measures, this is the first study which investigated the neurophysiological underpinnings of spatial presence. Spatial presence is considered a sense of being physically situated within a spatial environment portrayed by a medium (e.g., television, virtual reality). Twelve healthy children and 11 healthy adolescents were watching different virtual roller coaster scenarios. During a control session, the roller coaster cab drove through a horizontal roundabout track. The following realistic roller coaster rides consisted of spectacular ups, downs, and loops. Low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography (LORETA) and event-related desynchronization (ERD) were used to analyze the EEG data. As expected, we found that, compared to the control condition, experiencing a virtual roller coaster ride evoked in both groups strong SP experiences, increased electrodermal reactions, and activations in parietal brain areas known to be involved in spatial navigation. In addition, brain areas that receive homeostatic afferents from somatic and visceral sensations of the body were strongly activated. Most interesting, children (as compared to adolescents) reported higher spatial presence experiences and demonstrated a different frontal activation pattern. While adolescents showed increased activation in prefrontal areas known to be involved in the control of executive functions, children demonstrated a decreased activity in these brain regions. Interestingly, recent neuroanatomical and neurophysiological studies have shown that the frontal brain continues to develop to adult status well into adolescence. Thus, the result of our study implies that the increased spatial presence experience in children may result from the not fully developed control functions of the frontal cortex.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

From emotion perception to emotion experience: emotions evoked by pictures and classical music.

Most previous neurophysiological studies evoked emotions by presenting visual stimuli. Models of the emotion circuits in the brain have for the most part ignored emotions arising from musical stimuli. To our knowledge, this is the first emotion brain study which examined the influence of visual and musical stimuli on brain processing. Highly arousing pictures of the International Affective Picture System and classical musical excerpts were chosen to evoke the three basic emotions of happiness, sadness and fear. The emotional stimuli modalities were presented for 70 s either alone or combined (congruent) in a counterbalanced and random order. Electroencephalogram (EEG) Alpha-Power-Density, which is inversely related to neural electrical activity, in 30 scalp electrodes from 24 right-handed healthy female subjects, was recorded. In addition, heart rate (HR), skin conductance responses (SCR), respiration, temperature and psychometrical ratings were collected. Results showed that the experienced quality of the presented emotions was most accurate in the combined conditions, intermediate in the picture conditions and lowest in the sound conditions. Furthermore, both the psychometrical ratings and the physiological involvement measurements (SCR, HR, Respiration) were significantly increased in the combined and sound conditions compared to the picture conditions. Finally, repeated measures ANOVA revealed the largest Alpha-Power-Density for the sound conditions, intermediate for the picture conditions, and lowest for the combined conditions, indicating the strongest activation in the combined conditions in a distributed emotion and arousal network comprising frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital neural structures. Summing up, these findings demonstrate that music can markedly enhance the emotional experience evoked by affective pictures.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2005

Synaesthesia: when coloured sounds taste sweet.

Synaesthesia is the involuntary physical experience of a cross-modal linkage--for example, hearing a tone (the inducing stimulus) evokes an additional sensation of seeing a colour (concurrent perception). Of the different types of synaesthesia, most have colour as the concurrent perception, with concurrent perceptions of smell or taste being rare. Here we describe the case of a musician who experiences different tastes in response to hearing different musical tone intervals, and who makes use of her synaesthetic sensations in the complex task of tone-interval identification. To our knowledge, this combination of inducing stimulus and concurrent perception has not been described before.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2004

Morphological brain differences between adult stutterers and non-stutterers.

BACKGROUND: The neurophysiological and neuroanatomical foundations of persistent developmental stuttering (PDS) are still a matter of dispute. A main argument is that stutterers show atypical anatomical asymmetries of speech-relevant brain areas, which possibly affect speech fluency. The major aim of this study was to determine whether adults with PDS have anomalous anatomy in cortical speech-language areas. METHODS: Adults with PDS (n = 10) and controls (n = 10) matched for age, sex, hand preference, and education were studied using high-resolution MRI scans. Using a new variant of the voxel-based morphometry technique (augmented VBM) the brains of stutterers and non-stutterers were compared with respect to white matter (WM) and grey matter (GM) differences. RESULTS: We found increased WM volumes in a right-hemispheric network comprising the superior temporal gyrus (including the planum temporale), the inferior frontal gyrus (including the pars triangularis), the precentral gyrus in the vicinity of the face and mouth representation, and the anterior middle frontal gyrus. In addition, we detected a leftward WM asymmetry in the auditory cortex in non-stutterers, while stutterers showed symmetric WM volumes. CONCLUSIONS: These results provide strong evidence that adults with PDS have anomalous anatomy not only in perisylvian speech and language areas but also in prefrontal and sensorimotor areas. Whether this atypical asymmetry of WM is the cause or the consequence of stuttering is still an unanswered question.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Long-term training affects cerebellar processing in skilled keyboard players.

We studied cerebellar hemodynamic responses in highly skilled keyboard players and control subjects during complex tasks requiring unimanual and bimanual finger movements. Both groups showed strong hemodynamic responses in the cerebellum during the task conditions. However, non-musicians showed generally stronger hemodynamic responses in the cerebellum than keyboard players. We conclude that, due to long-term motor practice a different cortical activation pattern can be visualized in keyboard players. For the same movements fewer neurons need to be recruited. The different volume of the activated cortical areas might therefore reflect the different effort necessary for motor performance in both groups.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Different cortical activations for subjects using allocentric or egocentric strategies in a virtual navigation task.

Subjects were required to navigate through a virtual 3D labyrinth presented on a screen while fMRI images were obtained. Contrasting the fMRI images obtained during the navigation trials with appropriate control conditions revealed a bilateral network comprising the parietal lobe (including the intraparietal sulcus) and various lateral and medial premotor areas. The subjects using an allocentric strategy showed stronger activation in the medial temporal areas including the parahippocampal region, the hippocampus, and the thalamus. In addition, the cerebellum was also active in those subjects. We believe that this activation pattern is related to visually guided memory retrieval based on generalized spatial maps. The stronger activation in the thalamic-basal ganglia-cerebellar-loop points to a more automatic support of memory and attentional processes possibly supporting memorization of spatial maps.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Bimanual versus unimanual coordination: what makes the difference?

Using fMRI, we investigated the neuronal structures controlling bimanual coordination applying a visuomotor coordination task. Recent studies suggest the existence of a widespread network for the neuronal control of bimanual coordination including primary sensorimotor cortices (M1/S1), lateral and medial premotor cortices (PMC, SMA), cingulate motor area (CMA), and cerebellum (CB). In the present study, subjects performed bimanual and unimanual tasks requiring the coordination of two fingers at a time to navigate a cursor on a computer screen. Thus, in contrast to previous studies, we are using appropriate unimanual control (UNI) tasks. By using this new motor task, we identified a similar activation network for uni- and bimanual movements. Subjects exhibited bilateral activations in PMC, SMA, posterior-parietal cortex (PPC), occipital, and inferiotemporal cortex, as well as in the contralateral M1/S1 and ipsilateral CB. We did not find any additional activation when comparing bimanual with unimanual conditions. The lack of significant activation in the comparison "bimanual > unimanual" gives reason to suggest that this network is not limited to the control of bimanual motor actions, but responsible for unimanually coordinated movements as well. Interestingly, we found stronger activations for unimanual as compared to bimanual coordination. We hypothesize that task difficulty (degrees of freedom to control, e.g., number of limbs) is more important in determining which network components are activated and to what extent, compared to the factor of bimanuality. It even seemed to be less demanding for the motor system to control the cursor bimanually compared to the unimanual performance with two adjacent fingers.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Hearing syllables by seeing visual stimuli.

Currently it is discussed whether the same cortical areas are activated during the imagination of as during the actual presentation of specific stimuli. Some argue that mostly the secondary but not the primary sensory areas are active during imagination. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging we explored whether auditory verbal imagery of syllables has sufficient power to evoke haemodynamic responses in the auditory cortex. To overcome the detrimental effects of scanner noise, one group of subjects was trained to vividly imagine hearing a syllable while a flashlight was presented. A control group did not receive this training. We found that only the trained group revealed haemodynamic responses in the auditory cortex during auditory imagination while the control group showed no activation within the auditory cortex. Peak activations during auditory verbal imagery are located bilaterally within the superior temporal gyrus region in the vicinity of the planum temporale. While these secondary auditory areas are active during auditory verbal imagery, there was no activation in Heschl's gyrus. We hypothesize that auditory verbal imagery is associated with haemodynamic responses in secondary auditory and not primary auditory areas.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2003

Top-down and bottom-up modulation of language related areas--an fMRI study.

BACKGROUND: One major problem for cognitive neuroscience is to describe the interaction between stimulus and task driven neural modulation. We used fMRI to investigate this interaction in the human brain. Ten male subjects performed a passive listening and a semantic categorization task in a factorial design. In both tasks, words were presented auditorily at three different rates. RESULTS: We found: (i) as word presentation rate increased hemodynamic responses increased bilaterally in the superior temporal gyrus including Heschl's gyrus (HG), the planum temporale (PT), and the planum polare (PP); (ii) compared to passive listening, semantic categorization produced increased bilateral activations in the ventral inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and middle frontal gyrus (MFG); (iii) hemodynamic responses in the left dorsal IFG increased linearly with increasing word presentation rate only during the semantic categorization task; (iv) in the semantic task hemodynamic responses decreased bilaterally in the insula with increasing word presentation rates; and (v) in parts of the HG the hemodynamic response increased with increasing word presentation rates during passive listening more strongly. CONCLUSION: The observed "rate effect" in primary and secondary auditory cortex is in accord with previous findings and suggests that these areas are driven by low-level stimulus attributes. The bilateral effect of semantic categorization is also in accord with previous studies and emphasizes the role of these areas in semantic operations. The interaction between semantic categorization and word presentation in the left IFG indicates that this area has linguistic functions not present in the right IFG. Finally, we speculate that the interaction between semantic categorization and word presentation rates in HG and the insula might reflect an inhibition of the transfer of unnecessary information from the temporal to frontal regions of the brain.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2003

Assessment of reliability in functional imaging studies.

PURPOSE: To investigate the reliability of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), an approach for mapping and quantifying reliably activated voxels was developed. MATERIALS AND METHODS: First, a SPM99 analysis was performed, and the resulting statistical maps were taken as the basis for subsequent analyses of reliability. Several approaches were demonstrated using 1). a voxel-wise intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC); 2). an analysis of scatter plots, calculating the correlation of contrast t-values for pairs of activation maps; and 3). the ratio of overlapping volumes as suggested in the literature. The methods were applied to an fMRI study in which subjects were asked to vary their attentional effort during watching a flickering checkerboard pattern with varying letters in the center. The subjects had to ignore or attend to the presentation, or they had to detect a target letter within the checkerboard. RESULTS: The imaging data showed good reliability in terms of ICC for regions of visual processing, as well as for frontal areas, especially in the letter detection task. Furthermore, the size of reliable clusters depended on the presumed attentional effort of the subjects. CONCLUSION: Application of the method demonstrated that the activation due to visual stimulation could also be detected very consistently during a no-attend condition, but the reliability of the activations were best during the attended tasks.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Focused attention in a simple dichotic listening task: an fMRI experiment.

Whole-head functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used in nine neurologically intact subjects to measure the hemodynamic responses in the context of dichotic listening (DL). In order to eliminate the influence of verbal information processing, tones of different frequencies were used as stimuli. Three different dichotic listening tasks were used: the subjects were instructed to either concentrate on the stimuli presented in both ears (DIV), or only in the left (FL) or right (FR) ear and to monitor the auditory input for a specific target tone. When the target tone was detected, the subjects were required to indicate this by pressing a response button. Compared to the resting state, all dichotic listening tasks evoked strong hemodynamic responses within a distributed network comprising of temporal, parietal, and frontal brain areas. Thus, it is clear that dichotic listening makes use of various cognitive functions located within the dorsal and ventral stream of auditory information processing (i.e., the 'what' and 'where' streams). Comparing the three different dichotic listening conditions with each other only revealed a significant difference in the pre-SMA and within the left planum temporale area. The pre-SMA was generally more strongly activated during the DIV condition than during the FR and FL conditions. Within the planum temporale, the strongest activation was found during the FR condition and the weakest during the DIV condition. These findings were taken as evidence that even a simple dichotic listening task such as the one used here, makes use of a distributed neural network comprising of the dorsal and ventral stream of auditory information processing. In addition, these results support the previously made assumption that planum temporale activation is modulated by attentional strategies. Finally, the present findings uncovered that the pre-SMA, which is mostly thought to be involved in higher-order motor control processes, is also involved in cognitive processes operative during dichotic listening.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2002

Brain size and grey matter volume in the healthy human brain.

Magnetic resonance imaging was used to evaluate the influence of sex and brain size on compartmental brain volumes (grey matter, white matter, CSF) in a large and well-matched sample of neurologically normal women (n = 50) and men (n = 50). As expected, we found a significant sex difference for the absolute volumes of total brain, grey matter, white matter and CSF, with greater volumes for men. Relating these compartmental volume measures to brain volume resulting in proportional volume measures revealed a higher proportion of grey matter in women. No significant sex differences were found for white matter and CSF proportions. However, when the influence of sex was partialized out by regression analyses, brain volume explained 40-81% of the variance of the absolute grey matter, white matter and CSF volumes. Performing these regression analyses for the proportional volume measures revealed that brain volume explained approximately 16% of the variance in grey matter proportion. Sex or the interaction between sex and brain volume revealed no additional predicitve values. Interestingly, the correlation between brain volume and grey matter proportion was negative, with larger brains exhibiting relatively smaller proportions of grey matter. Thus, sex is not the main variable explaining the variability in grey matter volume. Rather, we suggest that brain size is the main variable determining the proportion of grey matter.

Adult↗