PEOPLE IN THE LAB

 

 

Janina Seubert Postdoctoral Fellow Phone: (267) 519-4688 Email

Personal:

Hello! My name is Janina Seubert and I have a background in functional neuroimaging of emotion and multisensory integration. As a graduate student, I worked at the Psychiatry departments of the University of Pennsylvania and RWTH Aachen University in Germany. After defending my thesis in 2010, I continued to work at the University of Pennsylvania as a postdoc studying emotion processing in schizophrenia before joining the Lundstrom Lab in May 2011.

My PhD thesis investigated how smells and emotional faces are integrated in the healthy brain, and to what extent this integration is disturbed in schizophrenia. This work sparked my interest in the neural processes that let us perceive gestalt-like objects in our environment, instead of disconnected parts. Here at Monell, I continue to conduct research that explores the integration of matching visual and olfactory stimuli in the human brain. In particular, I am interested in understanding how early sensory and higher order cognitive processes underlying these perceptions interact with each other when people evaluate the pleasantness of an object, and I use behavioral measures, EEG and fMRI to investigate these questions.

In the long term, I hope that increasing our understanding of the processes underlying feature integration in emotional processing will provide us with a framework to assess where the balance between these integration processes is disturbed in psychiatric illness, and develop methods for targeted intervention.

Publications:

Janina Seubert and Kathrin Ohla. (2012). A dynamic Cortical Network Encodes Violations of Extectancy During Taste Perception, Journal of Neuroscience, 32(6), 1918-9.

Theodore Satterthwaite, Daniel H Wolf, Amy E Pinkham, Kosha Ruparel, Mark A Elliott, Jeffrey N Valdez, Eve Overton, Janina Seubert, Raquel E Gur, Ruben C Gur, James Loughead (2011): Opposing Amygdala and Ventral Striatum Connectivity During Emotion Identification. Brain Cognition. 76(3), 353-63.

Janina Seubert, Thilo Kellermann, James Loughead, Frank Boers, Colleen M. Brensinger, Ute Habel (2010): Processing of disgusted faces is facilitated by odor primes: a functional MRI study. Neuroimage, 53(2):746-756.

Janina Seubert, James Loughead, Thilo Kellermann, Frank Boers, Colleen M. Brensinger, Ute Habel (2010): Multisensory integration of emotionally valenced olfactory-visual information in schizophrenia patients. Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, 35(3), 35(3):185-194.

Janina Seubert, Amy F. Rea, James Loughead, Ute Habel (2009): Mood Induction with Olfactory Stimuli Reveals Differential Affective Responses in Males and Females. Chem. Senses; 34(1): 77-84.

Anne Giersch, Laurence Lalanne, Caroline Corves, Janina Seubert, Zhuanghua Shi, Jack Foucher, Mark A. Elliott (2009): Extended visual simultaneity thresholds in patients with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 35(4), 816-825.

Janina Seubert, Glyn W. Humphreys, Hermann J. Muller, Klaus Gramann (2008): Straight after the turn: the role of the parietal lobes for egocentric space processing. Neurocase, 14(2), 204-219.