Philipp Sterzer

..Such a mechanism could integrate endogenous and exogenous functional demands under the joint criterion of whether they challenge an individual's homeostasis...

..Such depressive perception may result not only from biased cognitive appraisal but also from automatic processing biases that influence the access of sensory information to awareness...

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..Thus, visual object stimuli undergo category-specific processing in the ventral visual pathway even when profoundly suppressed from awareness by binocular competition...

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..These novel findings point at a joint neuroanatomical substrate underpinning aggressive behaviour and impaired capacity of empathy and suggest a critical role for the anterior insula in regulating social behaviour...

..Our findings can thus be seen as a signature of when and where the brain "makes up its mind" about competing perceptual interpretations of a given sensory input pattern...

..This prefrontal-limbic interaction has been shown to be modulated by serotonin (5-HTT) genotype, indicating a higher risk for major depressive disorder (MDD) with increasing number of 5-HTT low-expression alleles...

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..We asked whether neural responses evoked by affect-laden pictures would be abnormal in adolescents with conduct disorder (CD)...

..These findings show that the neural mechanisms of emotion anticipation and processing are altered in patients with MDD and that these alterations are able to normalize after treatment with an antidepressant...

..They therefore emphasize the role of recurrent processing between visual cortical areas in human perceptual awareness...

..Our results suggest that individual dopamine storage capacity in amygdala subserves modulation of emotional processing in amygdala and dorsal cingulate, thereby contributing to individual differences in anxious temperament...

..Current evidence and our results are compatible with an interpretation that construes this effect of COMT genotype on striatal reactivity as a result of a cortico-striatal interaction...

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..These findings suggest that MDD patients show ventral striatal hyporesponsiveness during incentive cue processing, which normalizes after successful treatment...

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..Here, we investigated whether adverse temperament factors might contribute to an impairment in neural mechanisms underlying the regulation of aggressive behaviour...

..This hyporeactivity may contribute to clinical features like anergia, apathy, and loss of motivation in the context of both positive and negative incentives...

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..Altered prefrontal modulation in depression may contribute to impaired affect modulation and related clinical symptoms, such as anhedonia...

..Conversely, activation of feature-selective extrastriate regions depends on the type of cue used for correspondence matching and may reflect the salience of percepts that match in colour and motion...

..Moreover, this study in a large sample of patients reveals a mechanism underlying prefrontal inefficiency and cognitive deficits in schizophrenia, thereby providing direct experimental evidence for the dysconnectivity hypothesis...

..This stimulus-driven number-specific intraparietal response supports the idea of a supramodal number representation that is automatically accessed by presentation of numbers and may code magnitude information...

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..Our data suggest that, while a frontoparietal network subserves more general aspects in bistable visual perception, the activations in functionally specialized extrastriate visual cortex are highly category- or attribute-specific...

..However, experimental evidence for these hypotheses remains inconclusive, partly because direct comparisons between hemispheres are scarce...

..These findings indicate that visual awareness of faces in adults is governed by perceptual mechanisms that are sensitive to similar stimulus properties as those modulating newborns' face preferences...

..These results suggest that schizophrenia may be associated with a reduced susceptibility to visual phenomena that commonly rely on perceptual inference...

..By contrast, high-level components of basic face shape encoding involving ventral stream processing are eliminated by interocular suppression and require visual awareness...

..These results indicate an enhanced unconscious representation of direct gaze, enabling the automatic and rapid detection of other individuals making eye contact with the observer...

..These results indicate that perceptual mechanisms that govern access to visual awareness are highly sensitive to the presence of conspecifics...

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..Increased attribution of incentive salience to neutral or aversive stimuli might be associated with dysfunction of neuronal processing of positive and negative reinforcement and contribute to the formation of delusions in schizophrenia...

..Nevertheless, our findings also demonstrate that the b-CFS paradigm can be fruitfully applied as a highly sensitive device to probe differences between stimuli in their potency to gain access to awareness...