Research

Dr Gaby Pfeifer works as a Research Fellow in Prof. Critchley’s lab on a project called ‘Cardiac Control of Fear in the Brain’. She has a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, during which she examined the neural correlates of associative memory (encoding, retrieval, recognition and working memory) in grapheme-colour synaesthetes, young and older adults, as well as patients with mild cognitive impairment (Pfeifer et al., 2014; 2016). This work has set the basis of identifying how associative memory is represented in the brain.

In contributing to the project ‘Cardiac Control of Fear in Brain’, Gaby is keen to further pursue and extent her line of research (memory), by investigating the neural correlates of fear-associative memory using emotional stimuli presented at specific cardiac timings. For example, a previous study from the Critchley lab (Garfinkel et al., 2014) has shown that people rated faces with fearful expressions as more intense when these were presented at cardiac systole (when the heart contracts and sends nerve impulses to the brain) than at cardiac diastole (when the heart relaxes and nerve cells are inactive). Gaby’s research builds on these findings, examining how heart-related effects on perception affect memory for fearful stimuli and forge memory traces in the brain. Her current project examines which brain areas are involved when people perform a face-name learning task inside an MRI-scanner. With this study, Gaby is hoping to address exciting questions such as how the inhalation of oxytocin (an anxiety and stress-reducing hormone) and feedback presentation at specific cardiac timings modulates encoding and retrieval of emotional memories. A further study examines whether beta-adrenergic blockers might reduce the fear-enhancing memory effects at systole.

Her memory research contributes to the general understanding of anxiety disorders, showing that fear-memories may not just be formed via cognitive (brain-based) appraisal alone, but are tightly connected to bodily signals from the heart.