Research Lab for Stimulation of the Brain (FLaSH)

The “Stopp Stemmer” project began in 2016, funded by the faculty of psychology and the Trond Mohn Research Foundation. We used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) as a potential novel treatment to reduce auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia patients.

Information about the project follow this link

What are the neural underpinnings of brain asymmetry and attention?

Brain asymmetry refers to the phenomenon that the left and right halves of the brain are specialized for different functions. For example, you are likely to talk with your left hemisphere. By using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), we can up- or down-regulate neural activity in specific brain regions. That allows us to investigate which brain areas are crucial for brain asymmetry and attention. Here, we use very low electrical current (2mA). By using MRI we can explore which neurotransmitters are responsible for the effects of tDCS.

We assess both brain asymmetry and attention with a dichotic listening task, which is performed while participants receive tDCS and are inside the MR scanner. This allows us to examine the consequences of the brain stimulation “online”. A better understanding of brain asymmetry and attention may aid to develop better models for mental disorders like schizophrenia.

The experiment is now done and we are working on publishing the data.

Do you have literally the “blues”? What emotions do colours represent?

We all have associations and feelings connected to colours. But are these the same in people across different cultures, different countries, age groups, and across men and women? We are part of a large research network that investigates these questions, led by Prof. Christine Mohr, Deborah Epicoco, and Domicele Jonauskaite from the Laboratory for Experimental Research on Behavior, University of Lausanne.

You can help us by completing this online questionnaire. It only takes about 20-30 min:

https://www2.unil.ch/onlinepsylab/colour_poll_v2/colour/main.php

For questions please contact: Marco Hirnstein

When it comes to general intelligence, men and women do not show much of a difference. However, there are certain cognitive tasks in which females and males consistently outperform each other.

For example, females excel when they are asked to memorize a list of words or provide as many words as possible that start with a specific letter. In turn, when asked to mentally rotate 3-dimensional complex cube figures males typically achieve higher scores. These cognitive gender differences are at the core of fierce academic and societal disputes over gender equality issues and often attributed to either biology (sex hormones, genes, chromosomes) or society (differential upbringing of boys and girls, gender stereotypes).

We aim to investigate cognitive gender differences in a “psychobiosocial approach” (Halpern, 2000; Hausmann et al., 2009). That is, we do not only want to understand the individual impact of biological, social, AND psychological factors on cognitive gender differences, but, crucially, also how these factors interact.

References

Halpern, D. F. (2000). Sex differences in cognitive abilities (3rd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Hausmann, M., Schoofs, D., Rosenthal, H. E., & Jordan, K. (2009). Interactive effects of sex hormones and gender stereotypes on cognitive sex differences-A psychobiosocial approach. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 34(3), 389-401.