Publications by authors named "Susann Wolff"

Many challenges in life come without explicit instructions. Instead, humans need to test, select, and adapt their behavioral responses based on feedback from the environment. While reward-centric accounts of feedback processing primarily stress the reinforcing aspect of positive feedback, feedback's central function from an information-processing perspective is to offer an opportunity to correct errors, thus putting a greater emphasis on the informational content of negative feedback.

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In communication between humans as well as in human-computer interaction, feedback is ubiquitous. It is essential for keeping up the dialogue between interaction partners, evaluating the adequacy of an action, or improving task performance. While the neuroscientific view on feedback has largely focused on its function as reward, more general definitions also emphasise its function as information about aspects of one's task performance.

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Human learning is one of the main topics in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. The analysis of experimental data, e.g.

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Decision-making is a high-level cognitive process based on cognitive processes like perception, attention, and memory. Real-life situations require series of decisions to be made, with each decision depending on previous feedback from a potentially changing environment. To gain a better understanding of the underlying processes of dynamic decision-making, we applied the method of cognitive modeling on a complex rule-based category learning task.

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We present two ERP studies on the processing of word order variations in Japanese, a language that is suited to shedding further light on the implications of word order freedom for neurocognitive approaches to sentence comprehension. Experiment 1 used auditory presentation and revealed that initial accusative objects elicit increased processing costs in comparison to initial subjects (in the form of a transient negativity) only when followed by a prosodic boundary. A similar effect was observed using visual presentation in Experiment 2, however only for accusative but not for dative objects.

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In previous studies that have tried to extinguish conditioned inhibition through nonreinforced presentations of the inhibitor, researchers have repeatedly failed to find evidence for such extinction. The present study revealed that extinction can be achieved through nonreinforcement of the inhibitor, depending on properties of the reinforcer. In a human causal learning experiment, we found complete extinction in a scenario in which the reinforcer could take on negative values.

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