Kognitive Neurobiologie
Research Interests
My research deals with two main questions:
- Is it possible to improve cognitive performance of normal subjects with drugs? E.g. does nicotine improve performance in spatial attention? And what are the underlying ‘brain mechanisms’ of these drug effects?
- Do subjects react differentially to drugs? Are these differential drug effects due to inter-subject differences before drug intake (like different brain networks that are used to solve a cognitive task)?
Currently, I employ multivariate analyses techniques like partial least square which have higher predictive capability and are closer to the idea that cognitive tasks are solved on the basis of distributed brain networks. However, these approaches have also to deal with many methodological problems. Many advanced statistical analysis techniques which are widely used in behavioural sciences can be adapted to the analysis of fMRI data to get a deeper insight in these questions.
Publications
Journal articles
Assmus A, Giessing C, Weiss PH, & Fink GR. (2007). Functional interactions during the retrieval of conceptual action knowledge: an fMRI study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience,19:1004-1012.
Giessing C, Fink GR, Rösler F, & Thiel CM. (2007). fMRI data predict individual differences of behavioral effects of nicotine: A partial least square analysis. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19:658-670.
Giessing C, Thiel CM, Rösler F, & Fink GR. (2006). The modulatory effects of nicotine on parietal cortex activity in a cued target detection task depend on cue reliability. Neuroscience, 137:853-864.
Giessing C, Thiel CM, Stephan KE, Rösler F, & Fink GR (2004). Visuospatial attention: How to measure effects of infrequent, unattended events in a blocked stimulus design. Neuroimage, 23:1370-1381.
Vorhold V, Giessing C, Wiedemann PM, Schütz H, Gauggel S, & Fink GR (in press). The neural basis of risk ratings: Evidence from a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study. Neuropsychologia
Conference abstracts
Assmus A, Weiss PH, Giessing C, & Fink GR (2005). Encoding of conceptual action knowledge: an fMRI study. Abstract Viewer/Itinerary Planner. Washington, DC: Society for Neuroscience. Online.
Giessing C, Fink GR, Rösler F, & Thiel CM (2006). fMRI data predict individual differences of behavioural effects of nicotine: A partial least square analysis. 12th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, Florence, Italy.
Giessing C, Thiel CM, Stephan KE, Zilles K, & Fink GR (2005). Effects of nicotine depend upon top-down information: Pharmacological manipulation of parietal cortex activity in a cued target detection task. 11th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, Toronto, Canada.
Giessing C, Thiel CM, Stephan KE, Rösler F, & Fink GR (2004). Visuospatial attention: How to measure effects of infrequent, unattended events in a blocked stimulus design. Neural plasticity, 12:20.
Giessing C, Thiel CM, Stephan KE, Zilles K, & Fink GR (2003). The effects of invalid cuing and hand of response in a spatial attention task: An event-related fMRI study. 9th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, New York, USA.
Giessing C, Thiel CM, Stephan KE, Zilles K, & Fink GR (2003). The effects of invalid cuing and hand of response in a spatial attention task: An event-related fMRI study. Convergence and Divergence of Lesion Studies and Functional Imaging of Cognition, Bonn, Germany.
Vorhold V, Giessing C, Wiedemann PM, Schütz H, Gauggel S, & Fink GR (2006). A fMRI study on the neural mechanisms underlying risk judgments. Neuro-Visionen: Posterwettbewerb des Kompetenznetzwerks NeuroNRW, Nordrhein-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Düsseldorf, Germany.
Vorhold V, Giessing C, Wiedemann PM, Gaugel S, & Fink GR (2006) A functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) study on the neural mechanisms underlying the processing of risk-words in normal persons. 14th SRA Symposium "Strategies for Risk Communication: Evolution, Evidence and Experience", New York, NY, USA.
Conference Talks
Giessing C (2007). Cholinergic Modulation of Cognitive Function as Detected with Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Society of Biological Psychiatry. 62nd Annual Scientific Convention, May 17-19,
Grants
Travel award from the Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology and German Federal Ministry of Education and Research to attend the 13th Annual Meeting of the Israel Society for Neuroscience in Israel.
Travel award from Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds to participate in the “Statistical Parametric Mapping Course” (Institute of Neurology / University College London).