Postdoc @UniofOxford with @MKFlugge, past PhD @DondersInst, into decision-making, learning, ultrasound stimulation, improving psychology & neuroscience. he/him
Oxford, United Kingdom
Joined December 2017
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I'm very happy to announce that I'll move to the Zurich Center for Neuroeconomics (ZNE) @econ_uzh
to work with @ChristianCRuff and many others in September, funded by a grant from the
@snsf_ch (Swiss version of Marie-Curie) and the UZH Priority Program URPP Adabd! 🇨🇭⛰️🧀🍫🎉
JohannesAlgermissen@johalgermissen@bsky.social retweeted
[preprint] Probability weighting arises from boundary repulsions of cognitive noise biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
JohannesAlgermissen@johalgermissen@bsky.social retweeted
📢 New preprint 📢
(with Daniil Luzyanin)
We use a new task to distinguish between the instantaneous and instrumental (goal-oriented) value of the same choice option in the brain using fMRI: biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
JohannesAlgermissen@johalgermissen@bsky.social retweeted
check out @RussinJake 's new paper on the interplay between in-context and in-weight learning in neural nets can explain tradeoffs in human learning
pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pn…
That’s it! Thanks to great collaborators Tim den Boer Elly Martin Brad Treeby Michael Gray Robin Cleveland @mkwittmann Will Clarke @EFouragnan Matthew Rushworth and funders @wellcometrust @UKRI_News ! More TUS work from Miriam's lab coming soon! (15/15)
... or suggesting that TUS impairs people's ability to recognize the negative cues in the ambiguous neutral faces (maybe supporting ideas about BLA hemispheric lateralization---our targeting of the right BLA, associated with negative emotions, was much better) ... (14/15)
... in sum, we find evidence that TUS to the BLA changes RS-connectivity, metabolite concentration, and emotional action biases towards faces. This might reflect the BLA's causal role in interpreting ambiguous faces, with TUS making people confuse happy/neutral faces ... (13/15)
... in behaviour, mIns-TUS did not affect the emotional action biases. However, it did increase participants' propensity to repeat responses, reflected in a higher positive learning rate ... (11/15)
... finally, we turned to our active control region, the mIns. TUS to mIns did not change RS-connectivity. However, it increased GABA measured with MRS, suggesting the same ultrasound protocol might be inhibitory in the BLA, but excitatory in the mIns... (10/15)
… under TUS to the BLA, however, participants showed a stronger tendency to approach neutral faces, an effect that scaled with the volume of bilaterally stimulated tissue. Similar, RTs for happy and neutral faces slowed. There was no change in learning from feedback ... (9/15)
... overall, participants showed an emotional bias, approach happy more than neutral and angry faces (with the same bias in RTs). This was also captured by a reinforcement learning model with separate action biases for the different emotions .... (8/15)
… third, we had participants play in novel task in which saw mini-blocks of happy/neutral/angry faces and had to learn from trial-and-error whether to approach/those (button press + face grows/shrinks). After 4-7 trials, a new mini-block with a different emotion started...(7/15)
... second, we found TUS to the BLA change metabolite concentration in the BLA, specifically increasing GABA, suggesting a net inhibition (decreased E/I balance) after TUS ... (6/15)
... first, we found that TUS to the BLA reduces its RS connectivity to several mono-/di-synaptically connected regions. Effects occurred immediately after stimulation as well as 90 minutes later, corroborating findings that TUS can change neural activity for > 1 hour ... (5/15)
... so we invited 33 healthy participants to 3 sessions (basolateral amygdala (BLA) stimulation, mid-insula (mIns) stimulation, or sham) in which they received 80 seconds of offline TUS and then went to the MRI scanner for 1.5h to collect fMRI, MRS, and behavioural data... (4/15)
... to understand its causal role in (a) interpreting facial emotions and (b) adjust behaviour to feedback. NHP work suggests the amygdala being crucial for both. Also, these processes are altered in patients with depression/anxiety, who show altered amygdala metabolism... (3/15)
… Link here: biorxiv.org/cgi/content/shor… ... (2/15)
Very happy to share my first preprint from Oxford EP @OxNeuro ! We (me + co-first authors @lilwebian Miruna Rascu + PI Miriam Klein-Flügge + many others) used transcranial focused ultrasound stimulation (TUS/tFUS/LIFU) of the human amygdala ... (1/15)
JohannesAlgermissen@johalgermissen@bsky.social retweeted
New preprint from the lab, produced in collab with Simon Killcross' lab: Modelling compulsive actions in rats and mice: The back-translation of value-modulated attentional capture from humans to rodents:
osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/xd…
Come to Pavlovian next week to see more