My most relevant current projects

Music for Autism “M4A”

Collaboration partners: Dr. Giorgia Silani, Dr. Christian Gold.

In this project, I was responsible for the design and implementation of the music prediction task, in which children are presented with consonant and dissonant stimuli and learn to associate them with certain images. Our aim is to investigate whether prediction forming is disturbed in ASD and whether musictherapy can have a beneficial effect on music-related and social predictions.
For more info, see my preprints or the project website at: https://www.m4a-project.net/

Dog´s perception of social interaction

Leading author in project (MRI-research). Selection of collaborators: Prof. Claus Lamm, Prof. Ludwig Huber, Dr. Christoph Völter, Dr. Magdalena Boch, Lucrezia Lonardo

The core project of my postdoctoral research revolves around the evolution of social cognition in humans and dogs. Within this project, I am running studies about social and non-social interaction perception, somatosensory perception, and observation of vicarious touch in others. Doing fMRI scanning with dogs is challenging, thus I have also worked on hardware improvements for the MRI scanning. For more information on our projects (and cute pictures of dogs in scanners), click the “CCNU” Tab at the top of this page.

Human attitudes towards canines

Collaboration partners: Prof. Dr. Friederike Range, PI Dr. Sarah Marshall-Pescini, Dr. Gwen Wirobski (Wolf Science Center).

In this project, I am responsible for designing explicit and implicit measures of attitudes towards dogs, wolves, and free-ranging dogs. To this end, we developed a questionnaire measuring sociodemographic data and attitudes. Additionally, I designed an adaptation of an IAT (implicit association test) to measure response-time based implicit biases for different animals.

ManyDogs

In a time of replication crises, big team science is one important way to make sure our findings are robust and valid. I joined ManyDogs in 2021 and have contributed to two manuscripts (see publications section) and found a community of supportive canine researchers there. If you want to join the project, or for more information, visit: https://manydogsproject.github.io/.

Other

• A comprehensive model of retrieval practice and its neural bases (with Prof. Nico Bunzeck, University of Lübeck)
• Connective Field Modeling in canines (with Dr. Nicholas Hedger, University of Reading)
• Somatosensory perception and temperament in domestic pigs (co-author, leads: Dr. Charlotte Goursot, Dr. Oceane Schmitt, Dr. Jean-Loup Rault, Veterinary Medical University Vienna, and Dr. David Val-Laillet, INRAE, Université de Rennes and his team)
• Multimodal perception of musical chords in professional and lay musicians (with Prof. Lars Kuchinke, International Psychoanalytic University Berlin)

Feel free to contact me for questions or collaboration requests!