Theses and Interships

In the area of emotional memory and emotional processing, we investigate when and how memories of emotionally stressful events become maladaptive. To this end, we work with mentally healthy subjects and use experimental paradigms that simulate memory-related symptoms of emotional disorders such as PTSD and depression. Our research group is particularly interested in the influence of sleep: Both memory content and emotions are processed during sleep, but many mechanisms and connections are not yet sufficiently understood. In our research, we use behavioural paradigms as well as imaging methods that record the brain activity of test subjects both during cognitive tasks and during sleep (e.g. EEG, MRI).

Our memory does not only serve to store memories of past events. On the contrary, we assume that we use memories to learn rules and connections that enable us to make predictions about the future. The rules we learn can be adapted again and again through new experiences. This allows us to respond appropriately to new situations. In various experimental paradigms, we therefore investigate how we generalise knowledge from individual experiences and how our memory remains malleable, e.g. by adapting our mental strategies when the objectives of learning tasks change. We are particularly interested in adaptive forgetting, which helps us to break learned behaviour patterns. We investigate which factors promote adaptive memory formation (including learning strategies and sleep) and use imaging research (e.g. EEG and MRI) to elucidate the underlying neural mechanisms.

Sleep plays an important role in memory formation. Our research group is interested in the mechanisms underlying this positive effect of sleep. One idea is that sleep-specific oscillations in electrical brain activity play a decisive role in this process. We want to test this directly and, for example, specifically amplify or disrupt sleep spindles and slow waves of deep sleep. We are also interested in the effects that sleep has on complex human behaviour. Here, we want to investigate whether sleep helps us gain insight into problem-solving processes.