Check also my twitter summaries! See all below the publications (click here).
Task-related Aperiodic EEG (1/f) Activity in Autism
You can find the original work here (preprint). The brain relies on a sensitive balance between excitation (increasing activity) and inhibition (decreasing activity). In autism, this balance (E/I) is often hypothesised to be atypical. We used EEG’s “1/f slope”—a proxy for E/I dynamics—to investigate this. Prior studies looking at E/I balance in autistic adults at rest have…
Subjective and objective difficulty of emotional facial expression perception from dynamic stimuli
You can find the original article here (open access). Is it difficult to read emotions? It can be. Is it always equally difficult? No. Why? That was our question in our study. Background For some people reading people’s emotional expressions is easier that for others, and that varies in different situations. But why? Is it about the observer? The…
Socially induced negative emotions elicit neural activity in the mentalizing network in a subsequent inhibitory task
You can find the original article here (open access). In this study, we induced emotions towards pictures of other people in our participants with an economic trust game. Participants got to like one player, dislike another, and have neutral affect for the third (no interaction in the game). You may already know this design from our previous…
Socially induced negative affective knowledge modulates early face perception but not gaze cueing of attention
You can find the original article here (open access). In this study, we made participants like and dislike other people by using a social interactive game, and then we checked how their brains responded to pictures of the co-players. In fact, there were no other players, just algorithms designed to play “fair” or not. However,…
Pupillary Responses to Faces Are Modulated by Familiarity and Rewarding Context
Every day we see dozens of faces and we are experts in their processing. Faces carry a lot of information, one of which is feedback and reward for our actions. For example, when we do something and our friend smiles in response, it’s rewarding. On the other side, sometimes we see people smile, but this…
Multidimensional View on Social and Non-social Rewards
Social rewards are often compared in experimental designs with non-social ones: a popular pair is money (non-social) vs. a smile (social). However, we often forget that money and smiles differ on many more dimensions than just sociality. For example, money is tangible, but a smile is not. Can we then draw informative conclusions about the…
Autistic Traits Affect Reward Anticipation but not Reception
Persons with autism may be experiencing troubles interacting socially with others because of a decreased sensitivity of their brains to social stimuli (like faces, speech, gestures, etc.). Because autism is a spectrum reaching from neurotypical persons with little or no autistic traits on one end and low-functioning persons with autism on the other, we measured…
MagdaLena Matyjek, Ph.D. 