Martin Schürmann, Dr. med. habil. (MD PhD)
Associate Professor and Reader in Cognitive Neuroscience
School of Psychology please see staff directory entry
University of Nottingham
Nottingham NG7 2RD, United Kingdom

Research: areas of interest

Selected publications

• Hedonic context modulates risky choices and reward responses in amygdala and dorsal striatum.
  Halko ML, Mäkelä T, Nummenmaa L, Hlushchuk Y, Schürmann M
  Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics 8 (2015) 100-115 (DOI: 10.1037/npe0000036)
  The hedonic context of the environment can alter an individual's emotional states and consequently their risk taking. Here we reveal the brain mechanisms underlying music-induced unstable risk preferences using functional MRI (fMRI). Subjects listened to self-selected liked or disliked music while they decided to accept or reject risky gambles. Behaviorally loss aversion was lower during liked music than during disliked or no music. At the neural level, reduced loss aversion was associated with a specific pattern of value coding in amygdala and dorsal striatum: during disliked music gambles with high expected reward induced higher activation than gambles with low expected reward, whereas during liked music this activation pattern was reversed. Furthermore, individual differences in loss aversion influenced value coding in such a way that for the most loss-averse subjects, bilateral activation of anterior insula, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and posterior parietal cortex increased as the expected value of the gamble increased, whereas for the least loss-averse subjects increase in potential reward was associated with decreasing activation in those areas. We propose music-modulated value coding in amygdala and striatum as a neural mechanism supporting emotion-dependent adjustments to risk-taking which in turn facilitate behavior depending on how dangerous versus safe the environment is experienced to be.

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• Kamin blocking as associated with reduced medial-frontal gyrus activation: Implications for prediction error abnormality in schizophrenia
  Moran PM, Rouse JL, Cross B, Corcoran R, Schürmann M
  PLoS One 7 (2012) e43905 (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0043905)
  The following study used 3-T functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural signature of Kamin blocking. Kamin blocking is an associative learning phenomenon seen where prior association of a stimulus (A) with an outcome blocks subsequent learning to an added stimulus (B) when both stimuli are later presented together (AB) with the same outcome. While there are a number of theoretical explanations of Kamin blocking, it is widely considered to exemplify the use of prediction error in learning, where learning occurs in proportion to the difference between expectation and outcome. In Kamin blocking as stimulus A fully predicts the outcome no prediction error is generated by the addition of stimulus B to form the compound stimulus AB, hence learning about it is “blocked”. Kamin blocking is disrupted in people with schizophrenia, their relatives and healthy individuals with high psychometrically-defined schizotypy. This disruption supports suggestions that abnormal prediction error is a core deficit that can help to explain the symptoms of schizophrenia. The present study tested 9 healthy volunteers on an f-MRI adaptation of Oades' “mouse in the house task”, the only task measuring Kamin blocking that shows disruption in schizophrenia patients that has been independently replicated. Participant's Kamin blocking scores were found to inversely correlate with Kamin-blocking-related activation within the prefrontal cortex, specifically the medial frontal gyrus. The medial frontal gyrus has been associated with the psychological construct of uncertainty, which we suggest is consistent with disrupted Kamin blocking and demonstrated in people with schizophrenia. These data suggest that the medial frontal gyrus merits further investigation as a potential locus of reduced Kamin blocking and abnormal prediction error in schizophrenia.

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• Embodied visual perception of distorted finger postures
  Schürmann M, Hlushchuk Y, Hari R
  Human Brain Mapping, 32 (2011) 612-623 (DOI: 10.1002/hbm.21049).
  Bodily abnormalities in other persons often evoke an uneasy feeling. Here, we studied the brain basis of such perceptual salience by presenting static pictures of distorted hand postures to healthy subjects during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Cortical activation sensitive to distorted (vs. natural) finger postures was found—with right-hemispheric dominance—in the primary motor cortex, postcentral somatosensory areas, amygdala, and insula, and bilaterally in the putamen. This activation pattern suggests that the instantaneous “gut feelings” during the observation of bodily distortions in others are related to embodied percepts that also involve affect-related brain areas.

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• Competing with peers: Mentalizing-related brain activity reflects what is at stake
  Halko ML, Hlushchuk Y, Hari R, Schürmann M
  NeuroImage 46 (2009) 542-548.
  Competition imposes constraints for humans who make decisions. Concomitantly, people do not only maximize their personal profit but they also try to punish unfair conspecifics. In bargaining games, subjects typically accept equal-share offers but reject unduly small offers; competition affects this balance. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study adjustment to competition in a bargaining game where subjects competed against another person for the share of the stake. For medium-sized, but not for minimum offers, competition increased the likelihood of acceptance and thus shifted behavior towards maximizing personal profits, emphasizing the importance of financial incentives. Specifically for medium-sized offers, competition was associated with increased brain activation bilaterally in the temporo-parietal junction, a region associated with mentalizing. In the right inferior frontal region, competition-related brain activation was strongest in subjects whose high acceptance rates in the standard ultimatum game hinted at a profit-oriented approach. The results suggest a network of brain areas supporting decision making under competition, with incentive-dependent mentalizing engaged when the competitor's behavior is difficult to predict and when the stake is attractive enough to justify the effort.

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• Manifest disease associated with decreased motor-cortex reactivity in twins discordant for schizophrenia
  Schürmann M, Järveläinen J, Avikainen S, Cannon TD, Lönnqvist J, Huttunen M, Hari R
  British Journal of Psychiatry 191 (2007) 178-179.
  Schizophrenia is often associated with difficulties in distinguishing between actions of self and of others. This could reflect dysfunction of the mirror neuron system which directly matches observed and executed actions. We studied 11 people with schizophrenia and their co-twins without manifest disease, using stimulus-induced changes in the magnetoencephalographic approximately 20 Hz rhythm as an index of activation in the motor cortex part of the mirror neuron system. During action observation and execution, motor cortex reaction was weaker in those with schizophrenia than in their co-twins, suggesting a disease-related dysfunction of motor cognition.

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• The compassionate brain: Humans detect intensity of pain from another’s face
  Saarela MV, Hlushchuk Y, Williams AC de C, Schürmann M, Kalso E, Hari R
  Cerebral Cortex 17 (2007) 230-237.
  Understanding another person's experience draws on "mirroring systems," brain circuitries shared by the subject's own actions/feelings and by similar states observed in others. Lately, also the experience of pain has been shown to activate partly the same brain areas in the subjects' own and in the observer's brain. Recent studies show remarkable overlap between brain areas activated when a subject undergoes painful sensory stimulation and when he/she observes others suffering from pain. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we show that not only the presence of pain but also the intensity of the observed pain is encoded in the observer's brain-as occurs during the observer's own pain experience. When subjects observed pain from the faces of chronic pain patients, activations in bilateral anterior insula (AI), left anterior cingulate cortex, and left inferior parietal lobe in the observer's brain correlated with their estimates of the intensity of observed pain. Furthermore, the strengths of activation in the left AI and left inferior frontal gyrus during observation of intensified pain correlated with subjects' self-rated empathy. These findings imply that the intersubjective representation of pain in the human brain is more detailed than has been previously thought.

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• Touch activates human auditory cortex
  Schürmann M, Caetano G, Hlushchuk Y, Jousmäki V, Hari R
  NeuroImage 30 (2006) 1325-1331.
  Vibrotactile stimuli can facilitate hearing, both in hearing-impaired and in normally hearing people. Accordingly, the sounds of hands exploring a surface contribute to the explorer's haptic percepts. As a possible brain basis of such phenomena, functional brain imaging has identified activations specific to audiotactile interaction in secondary somatosensory cortex, auditory belt area, and posterior parietal cortex, depending on the quality and relative salience of the stimuli. We studied 13 subjects with non-invasive functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to search for auditory brain areas that would be activated by touch. Vibration bursts of 200 Hz were delivered to the subjects' fingers and palm and tactile pressure pulses to their fingertips. Noise bursts served to identify auditory cortex. Vibrotactile-auditory co-activation, addressed with minimal smoothing to obtain a conservative estimate, was found in an 85-mm3 region in the posterior auditory belt area. This co-activation could be related to facilitated hearing at the behavioral level, reflecting the analysis of sound-like temporal patterns in vibration. However, even tactile pulses (without any vibration) activated parts of the posterior auditory belt area, which therefore might subserve processing of audiotactile events that arise during dynamic contact between hands and environment.

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• Yearning to yawn: the neural basis of contagious yawning
  Schürmann M, Hesse MD, Stephan KE, Saarela M, Zilles K, Hari R, Fink GR
  NeuroImage 24 (2005) 1260-1264.
  Yawning is contagious: Watching another person yawn may trigger us to do the same. Here we studied brain activation with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while subjects watched videotaped yawns. Significant increases in the blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal, specific to yawn viewing as contrasted to viewing non-nameable mouth movements, were observed in the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) and bilaterally in the anterior STS, in agreement with the high affinity of STS to social cues. However, no additional yawn-specific activation was observed in Broca's area, the core region of the human mirror-neuron system (MNS) that matches action observation and execution. Thus, activation associated with viewing another person yawn seems to circumvent the essential parts of the MNS, in line with the nature of contagious yawns as automatically released behavioural acts-rather than truly imitated motor patterns that would require detailed action understanding. The subjects' self-reported tendency to yawn covaried negatively with activation of the left periamygdalar region, suggesting a connection between yawn contagiousness and amygdalar activation.

Full list of publications (pdf)

Short CV (pdf)

Teaching

Tutorial information (accessible from workstations in University of Nottingham network)

Module C83MPR/C83MUB Research project (third year) (accessible from workstations in University of Nottingham network)

This webpage is under construction