Monika RIEGEL
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I am interested in the relationship between emotion and memory. My Ph.D. project supervised by Prof. Anna Grabowska and Dr. Artur Marchewka (Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Warsaw, Poland) focused on the role of amygdala in encoding and reinstatement of memories related to distinct emotions - disgust and fear. During my first research stay in Geneva supervised by Prof. Patrik Vuilleumier (CISA, Switzerland) I further explored distinct behavioural, physiological and neural effects of disgust and fear on memory in terms of emotion schemas. During my first postdoc under supervision of prof. Lila Davachi (Columbia University, NYC, US) I explored the influence of emotional brain states on subsequent learning and consolidation, trying to disentangle what is the role of affective (arousal) and cognitive (expectations) aspects of emotional experience.
Currently, as a postdoc supervised by prof. Ulrike Rimmele and prof. Patrik Vuilleumier (CISA) I’m interested in how cortisol (i.e. a stress hormone that is released upon a stressful experience) may affect our memory for complex events and its underlying neural mechanism. These effects will be explored in an ecologically valid, immersive experimental setting (virtual reality), enabling to study memory of events within a spatiotemporal context.