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 the mechanisms of how neuromodulation by cortisol (i.e. a stress hormone that is released upon a stressful experience) affects our memory for complex events. These effects will be explored in an ecologically valid, immersive experimental setting (virtual reality), enabling to study memory of events within a spatiotemporal context. It is currently unclear what aspects of memory are particularly vulnerable to cortisol modulation. At the behavioural level, I will therefore investigate how stress affects the ability to discriminate a particular memory from other, similar memories (lure discrimination) and the ability to retrieve associations of particular events with their spatiotemporal contexts (associative retrieval). At the neural level, I will investigate stress modulation of related neurocomputational operations: pattern separation and reinstatement, respectively.

Funding

• Swiss National Science Foundation, Excellenza, no. 186911 to U.R.
• National Agency of Academic Exchange Poland, the Bekker program, no. PPN/BEK/2020/1/00459/U/00001 to M.R.

Publications

• Wierzba, M., Riegel, M., Kocoń, J.,  Miłkowski, P., Janz, A., Klessa, K., Juszczyk, K., Konat, B., Grimling, D., Piasecki, M. & Marchewka, A. (2021). How basic emotions and emotional congruency with context interact to influence memory. Behavior Research Methods.
• Riegel, M., Wypych, M., Wierzba, M., Szczepanik, M., Jednoróg, K., Vuilleumier, P., & Marchewka, A. (submitted). How basic emotions and emotional congruency with context interact to influence memory. Manuscript available upon request.
• Riegel, M., Wierzba, M., Wypych, M., Ritchey, M., Jednoróg, K., Grabowska, A., Vuilleumier, P. & Marchewka, A. (submitted).  Distinct medial-temporal lobe mechanisms of encoding and amygdala-mediated memory reinstatement for disgust and fear. BioRxiv, https://doi.org/10.1101/825844
• Thorp, J. , Clewett, D., & Riegel, M. (2020). Two Routes to Incidental Memory under Arousal: Dopamine and Norepinephrine. Journal of Neuroscience, 40 (9) 1790-1792.
• Wierzba, M., Riegel, M., Wypych, M., Jednoróg, K., Grabowska, A., & Marchewka, A. (2018). Cognitive control over memory - individual differences in memory performance for emotional and neutral material. Scientific Reports, 8(1):3808.
• Riegel, M. , Moslehi, A., Michałowski, J.M., Żurawski, Ł., Horvat, M., Wypych, M., Jednoróg, K., & Marchewka, A. (2017). Nencki Affective Picture System: cross-cultural study in Europe and Iran. Front. Psychol., 8:274.
• Sarzyńska, J., Falkiewicz, M., Riegel, M., Babula, J., Margulies, D.S., Nęcka, E., Grabowska, A., & Szatkowska, I. (2017). More inteligent people are more likely to deceive. PLoS ONE, 12(4): e0176591.
• Marchewka, A., Wypych, M., Moslehi, A., Riegel, M., Michałowski, J. M., & Jednoróg, K. (2016). Arousal Rather than Basic Emotions Influence Long-Term Recognition Memory in Humans. Frontiers in Behavioural Neuroscience., 10:198.
• Riegel, M. , Wierzba, M., Grabowska, A., Jednoróg, K., & Marchewka, A. (2016). Effect of emotion on memory for words and their context. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 524(8):1636-1645.
• Riegel, M. , Żurawski, L., Wierzba, M., Moslehi, A., Klocek, L., Horvat, M., Grabowska, A., Michałowski, J., Jednoróg, K., & Marchewka, A . (2016). Characterization of the Nencki Affective Picture System by discrete emotional categories (NAPS BE). Behavior Research Methods, 48(2):600-12.
• Riegel, M., Wierzba, M., Wypych, M., Żurawski, L., Jednoróg, K., Grabowska, A., & Marchewka, A. (2015). Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL): the cultural adaptation of the Berlin Affective Word List – Reloaded (BAWL-R) for Polish. Behavior Research Methods, 47(4):1222-36.
• Wierzba, M., Riegel, M., Wypych, M., Jednoróg, K., Grabowska, A., & Marchewka, A. (2015). Basic emotions in The Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL BE): new method of classifying emotional stimuli. PLoS ONE, 10(7): e0132305.
• Wierzba M., Riegel, M., Pucz, A., Leśniewska Z, Dragan, W.Ł., Gola, M., Jednoróg, K., and Marchewka, A. (2015) Erotic subset for the Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS ERO): cross-sexual comparison study. Front. Psychol. 6:1336.
• Gawryś, L., Falkiewicz, M., Pilaciński, A., Riegel, M., Piątkowska-Janko, E., Bogorodzki, P., Wolak, T., Andrysiak, R., Królicki, L., Kulinski, R., Koziorowski, D., Janik, P., Rymarczyk, K., Grabowska, A., Kaczmarek, L., Szatkowska, I. (2014) The neural correlates of specific executive dysfunctions in Parkinson's Disease. Acta Neuorobiologicae Experimentalis, 74:465–478.

Conference papers

• Kocoń, J., Janz, A., Miłkowski, P., Riegel, M., Wierzba, M. (2019). Recognition of emotions, valence and arousalin large-scale multi-domain text reviews. 9th Language & Technology Conference: Human Language Technologies as a Challenge for Computer Science and Linguistics.
• Kocoń, J., Janz, A., Riegel, M., Wierzba, M. (2019). Propagation of emotions, arousal and polarity in WordNetusing Heterogeneous Structured Synset Embeddings. Global WordNet Conference 2019.

Publications dans l'archive ouverte