Publications by authors named "Steffen Landgraf"

Sexual scripts, that is, the mental representations of sexual behavior, are highly influenced by mating strategies and sexual experience. The relationship between these factors and sexual scripts is, however, poorly understood. Therefore, we assessed how long-term (e.

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Hardly any subjects enjoy greater - public or private - interest than the art of flirtation and seduction. However, interpersonal approach behavior not only paves the way for sexual interaction and reproduction, but it simultaneously integrates non-sexual psychobiological and cultural standards regarding consensus and social norms. In the present paper, we use script theory, a concept that extends across psychological and cultural science, to assess behavioral options during interpersonal approaches.

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Vocal events offer not only semantic-linguistic content but also information about the identity and the emotional-motivational state of the speaker. Furthermore, most vocal events have implications for our actions and therefore include action-related features. But the relevance and irrelevance of vocal features varies from task to task.

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Diagnoses of psychiatric diseases do not include criminal behavior. In schizophrenia, a non-negligible subgroup is incarcerated for capital and other crimes. Most studies that compared offender and non-offender patients with schizophrenia have only focused on male patients.

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The causes of schizophrenia are still unknown. For the last 100 years, though, both "absent" and "perfect" vision have been associated with a lower risk for schizophrenia. Hence, vision itself and aberrations in visual functioning may be fundamental to the development and etiological explanations of the disorder.

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Illiteracy remains a world-wide problem not only for children but also for adults. Phonological processing has been defined as a crucial factor for the acquisition of written language, which usually occurs in childhood. However, it is unclear to what extent phonological processing is necessary in order for adults to acquire written language skills.

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Accessing the temporal position of events (early or late in the event sequence) can influence the generation of predictions about upcoming events. However, it is unclear how the temporal position is processed strategically. To investigate this, we presented event pairs to 23 healthy volunteers manipulating temporal order (chronological, inverse) and temporal position (early, late).

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Cognitive deficits of patients with schizophrenia have been largely recognized as core symptoms of the disorder. One neglected factor that contributes to these deficits is the comprehension of time. In the present study, we assessed temporal information processing and manipulation from short- and long-term memory in 34 patients with chronic schizophrenia and 34 matched healthy controls.

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Background: Attention is impaired in schizophrenia. Early attention components include orienting and alerting, as well as executive control networks. Previous studies have shown mainly executive control deficits, while few of them found orienting and alerting abnormalities.

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Objectives: Cognitive deficits are of fundamental importance to the clinical picture of schizophrenia and are on the verge to be included as diagnostic criteria in the DSM-V. While focusing on information processing deficits, no emphasis has been put on whether patients' deficits can be accounted for by maladaptive information acquisition strategy deployment.

Methods: We tested 24 stabilized patients with schizophrenia and 25 matched controls in a visuo-spatial analogy task with graded difficulty.

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Developmental neuropsychology and functional neuroimaging evidence indicates that simple and complex mental calculation is subserved by a fronto-parietal network. However, the effective connectivity (connection direction and strength) among regions within the fronto-parietal network is still unexplored. Combining event-related fMRI and multivariate Granger Causality Mapping (GCM), we administered a multiplication verification task to healthy participants asking them to solve single and double-digit multiplications.

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Psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia patients encompass the difficulty to distinguish between the respective points of view of self and others. The capacity to adopt and switch between different perspectives is, however, fundamental for ego- and allocentric spatial referencing. We tested whether schizophrenia patients are able to adopt and maintain a non-egocentric point of view in a complex visual environment.

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Objective: Neurological Soft Signs (NSS) and impairments in oculomotor saccadic paradigms are both frequent in patients with schizophrenia but their correlation has never been explored.

Methods: 78 patients with DSM-IV schizophrenia (including 43 non-treated) and 41 matched healthy controls were tested for NSS, and on three saccadic tasks: prosaccades, predictive saccades and memory-guided saccades) using infrared oculometry. We analyzed correlations between NSS scores and latencies in all three tasks, rate of errors in memory-guided saccades, and rate of anticipated predictive saccades.

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Only a subset of adults acquires specific advanced mathematical skills, such as integral calculus. The representation of more sophisticated mathematical concepts probably evolved from basic number systems; however its neuroanatomical basis is still unknown. Using fMRI, we investigated the neural basis of integral calculus while healthy participants were engaged in an integration verification task.

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Objective: Although impairments in predictive saccades have been reported in patients with schizophrenia, this has never been explored in their biological relatives. We examined predictive saccades in age-and sex-matched siblings of patients with schizophrenia.

Method: Thirty siblings of schizophrenia patients, 30 healthy matched control subjects and 30 patients with schizophrenia performed a predictive saccades paradigm.

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