"Where was the toaster?" Nicole Klein defends her thesis
- Vinita Samarasinghe, M.A. M.Sc.
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- June 26, 2025
Congratulations to Nicole who successfully defended her thesis "Stronger together: The interplay between episodic and semantic memory in constructing past events and the influence of stress" on 25.06.25. Nicole is a member of P4 and under the supervision of PI Oliver Wolf has spent the past few year investigating the role of stress on memory. The catch phrase "Where was the toaster?" appears in many of her publications and is an integral part of the FOR 2812 framework appearing in all types of contexts.
Here are some of Nicole's publications:
Klein, N., Zöllner, C., Otto, T., Wolf, O. T., & Merz, C. J. (2025). Cortisol modulates hippocampus activation during semantic substitution in men. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 219, 108049. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.nlm.2025.108049
Zoellner, C., Klein, N., Cheng, S., Schubotz, R. I., Axmacher, N., & Wolf, O. T.. (2022). Where was the toaster? A systematic investigation of semantic construction in a new virtual episodic memory paradigm. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 174702182211166. http://doi.org/10.1177/17470218221116610
Fayyaz, Z., Altamimi, A., Zoellner, C., Klein, N., Wolf, O. T., Cheng, S., & Wiskott, L.. (2022). A Model of Semantic Completion in Generative Episodic Memory. Neural Computation, 34(9), 1841–1870. http://doi.org/10.1162/neco_a_01520
The research unit FOR 2812 "Constructing scenarios of the past: A new framework in episodic memory" is a project funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). The research unit studies the cognitive and neuronal mechanisms underlying scenario construction in episodic memory. We employ and integrate approaches from Philosophy, Psychology, and Experimental and Computational Neuroscience.
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