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To be announced
Prof. Giorgio di Lorenzo
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Non-Invasive Remote EEG Monitoring at Home in Epilepsy: Insights from the EEG@HOME Study
Dr. Andrea Biondi
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Deep brain ultrasound stimulation : state of the art transcranial focusing and clinical applications
Prof. Jean-Francois Aubry
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Contribution of new methods for combined EEG/MEG source analysis and optimized mc-TES to focal medication-resistant epilepsy
Prof. Dr. Carsten Wolters
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EEG from bench to bedside: Conventional electrophysiological biomarkers and applied deep learning in Psychiatry
Sebastian Olbrich
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Performance monitoring, post-error adjustments, and acetylcholine
Prof. Dr. med. habil. Markus Ullsperger
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Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation improves postoperative functional recovery in glioma patients: insights from Beijing Tiantan Hospital
Dr. Fan Xing on behalf of Prof. Jiang Tao
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To be announced
Prof. John Rothwell
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The pull of environmental affordances on selective attention
Dr. Zakaria Djebbara
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To be announced
John J. Foxe, PhD
Annett Schirmer obtained her PhD in 2002 for research conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany. After working there as a post-doctoral fellow, she began her first professorial appointment at the University of Georgia, USA in 2004, which was followed by appointments at the National University of Singapore and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 2022, Annett Schirmer joined the University of Innsbruck, Austria, where she now directs the Department of General Psychology II Emotion and Motivation. Schirmer has authored a textbook on Emotions that appeared with Sage and published over 70 empirical and theoretical articles for which citations place her among the top 2% of currently working scientists. She has been contributing to the field as an associate editor of ‘The British Journal of Psychology’ and the journal ‘Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience’. Research in the Schirmer lab examines the effect of nonverbal behaviors on interaction partners. Of particular interest are tactile behaviors, their processing pathways, and effects on intra- and interpersonal processes in the context of health and well-being. Although the main focus is on understanding human exchanges, the lab also explores exchanges with non-human species such as dogs.
Past research highlights the importance of gentle social touch for health and well-being, with C-tactile (CT) afferents—specialized mechanosensory fibers that respond to slow, gentle stroking—playing a key role. However, how CT-relevant touch is processed by the brain and the neural mechanisms through which it supports affect and homeostasis remain largely unknown.
A reason for this is that studying touch experimentally, particularly by contrasting different mechanosensory systems, poses significant technical challenges. Our group has addressed these by designing an EEG-compatible social touch robot. This innovation led to the discovery of an event-related potential component, the sN400, which appears uniquely tied to CT signaling. Its response properties differ from other somatosensory indexes like Rolandic rhythms, which are linked to mechanoreceptors other than CTs, are typically suppressed by touch, and show greater intra- and inter-individual variation.
In this talk, I will present our recent findings on the brain’s responses to gentle stroking, focusing on both CT and non-CT mechanosensory signals. I will explain how these signals interact and, surprisingly, how non-CT signals play a critical role in shaping cortical representations of CT-relevant touch. These findings suggest that non-CT processes are as important as CT processes in mediating the affective and health-regulatory benefits of social touch.