New DFG funding: The extension of the Heisenberg professorship for Translational Neuroimaging and related research projects were accepted!

Special thanks to all members and collaborators of the TNM-Lab!!!

The new focus of the prolongation project of PACT-SZ is on temporal recalibration. Although the preliminary results from the current project support our hypothesis of impaired action-feedback processing in patients, we cannot rule out that an impairment in temporal recalibration (i.e., adaptation to sensorimotor delays) contributes to dysfunctional action-perception coupling in schizophrenia. Thus, this phenomenon will be the focus of the new project.

Each of the three new work packages (WPs) will involve patients with hallucinations and / or passivity phenomena, patients without these symptoms and healthy participants. Two WPs will focus on fMRI to investigate the neural correlates of temporal recalibration (WP1) and cross-modal transfer of recalibration effects (WP2). In WP3, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) will be used to improve the processing of action perception coupling in patients. In all WPs, subjects will perform hand movements actively or passively using the passive movement device (PMD), thereby eliciting visual or auditory action feedback. To induce recalibration, the sensory feedback will be delayed in the adaptation blocks. In the test blocks, the detection of delays will be assessed. It is expected that 1) impairments in patients are, at least in part, based on insufficient recalibration of predictions within the cerebellum, 2) recalibration dysfunctions are particularly disturbing in a multisensory context and 3) cerebellar tDCS can be used to improve predictive mechanisms. In line with the translational neuroimaging approach, these projects aim at translating basic findings of previous neuroimaging research into a potential therapeutic treatment, thereby improving the action-perception coupling in patients.