Publications by authors named "R Huonker"

Article Synopsis
  • The study aims to classify human emotions within the first 300 milliseconds after a stimulus, revealing that the brain differentiates emotions quickly.
  • MEG signals from 17 participants were analyzed using Linear Discriminant Analysis to compare responses to pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral images across different time intervals.
  • The findings indicate a high classification performance, particularly in distinguishing unpleasant from neutral stimuli within 100-150 ms, highlighting that emotional processing begins very early in the brain's response.
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The processing of emotions in the human brain is an extremely complex process that extends across a large number of brain areas and various temporal processing steps. In the case of magnetoencephalography (MEG) data, various frequency bands also contribute differently. Therefore, in most studies, the analysis of emotional processing has to be limited to specific sub-aspects.

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Abnormal emotional reactions of the brain in patients with facial nerve paralysis have not yet been reported. This study aims to investigate this issue by applying a machine-learning algorithm that discriminates brain emotional activities that belong either to patients with facial nerve paralysis or to healthy controls. Beyond this, we assess an emotion rating task to determine whether there are differences in their experience of emotions.

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This work challenges the widely accepted model of sensory gating as a preattention inhibitory process by investigating whether attention directed at the second tone (S2) within a paired-click paradigm could affect gating at the cortical level. We utilized magnetoencephalography, magnetic resonance imaging and spatio-temporal source localization to compare the cortical dynamics underlying gating responses across two conditions (passive and attention) in 19 healthy subjects. Source localization results reaffirmed the existence of a fast processing pathway between the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and bilateral superior temporal gyri (STG) that underlies the auditory gating process.

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In ovo studies are a valuable option in preclinical research, but imaging studies are severely limited by the costs of dedicated equipment needed for small-sized eggs. We sought to verify the feasibility of using larger, ostrich, eggs () for imaging on the PET/CT scanners used for routine clinical investigations. Ostrich eggs were incubated until shortly before hatching, prepared for intravitelline venous injection of contrast medium or radiotracer, and imaged using native CT, contrast-enhanced CT, and PET/CT.

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