Overview - Research
Research in our Institute falls in the area of Translational Cognitive Neuroscience and focuses on studying the dynamics of brain activity in health and disease and along the life span.
Our interdisciplinary team uses state-of-the-art techniques from translational cognitive neuroimaging such as MEG, EEG, TES, TMS, MRI.
The Institute currently hosts five research groups led by Prof. Joachim Groß, Prof. Markus Junghöfer, Prof. Carsten Wolters, Dr. Omid Abbasi and Dr. Daniel Kluger.
Together, we aim to identify neural mechanism that support brain functions in cognitive domains such as attention, emotion, auditory, visual, somato-sensory and motor processing. At the same time we investigate changes of these mechanisms under pathological conditions including tinnitus, depression, epilepsy and anxiety disorders.
Our interdisciplinary research across all research groups unfolds along three main dimensions (Figure). First, we use Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and Electroencephalography (EEG) to measure brain activity non-invasively at very high temporal resolution in the order of milliseconds. Second, we perform Neurostimulation to modulate brain activity and associated behaviour. Third, we develop computational methods to further improve our decoding (dimension 1) and modulation (dimension 2) of brain activity.
Within each research group these research dimensions are applied to different topics in the area of Translational Cognitive Neuroscience.
In the following we highlight three of our ongoing projects
This large collaborative project aims to improve the understanding and treatment of affective disorders (AD), such as major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder. By combining continuous mobile assessment, in-depth clinical characterization, and multilevel neuroimaging, researchers will identify trajectories of recurrences and remissions, determine cognitive-emotional mechanisms and neurobiological correlates of acute symptom changes, and probe mechanism-based interventions. This research will involve a prospective cohort study, parallelized human and animal studies, and the application of novel idiographic intervention approaches. The ultimate goal is to predict the individual course of illness in AD patients and to develop targeted, mechanism-based interventions to prevent new episodes.
Rhythmic peripheral signals like respiratory, cardiac, and gastric activity not only serve our bodies’ strive for homeostasis, but actively modulate brain activity and behaviour. However, what are the functional mechanisms and signalling pathways by which these rhythms orchestrate brain function? Critically, these gaps also extend to studies in disease, which currently limits our understanding of how embodied processing contributes to pathology. Generally, it is unclear how multimodal physiological rhythms interact not only with each other, but also with high-dimensional brain dynamics.
The project will address these challenges by combining state-of-the-art MEG neuroimaging, computational modelling, and comprehensive physiological recordings to develop a novel framework of body-brain dynamics in health and disease. Overall, this project will establish an explanatory model to describe function and dysfunction of multimodal body-brain coupling and redefine the way we conceptualise, investigate, and ultimately understand the interplay of body and brain.
KIKAN is a research project with the aim of developing innovative approaches to make everyday life easier for children with anxiety disorders through playful therapy and to sustainably improve their quality of life.
Funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the KIKAN project is a collaboration between the universities of Münster, Osnabrück and Hamburg.
