Brain Products Young Scientist Award 2025 presented to Maren Giersiepen

by Stefanie Rudrich
Head of Marketing (Brain Products)

The Brain Products Young Scientist Award is presented each year to recognize a young researcher’s outstanding publication in the field of EEG-based psychophysiological research. The winner is chosen by an independent jury, which is appointed by the managing board of the “Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie und ihre Anwendung” (DGPA). At Brain Products, we want to have a positive impact on the fields of psychology and neuroscience and thereby award and celebrate excellent EEG research in these domains. By continuously recognizing young scientists, we aim to support the next generation of researchers and their scientific discoveries

This year’s award ceremony took place on June 21st at the 50th Annual Conference “Psychologie & Gehirn” (PuG) in Wuerzburg (Germany), where Maren Giersiepen was presented as the Young Scientist Award winner 2025. Maren is a PhD student in the Department of Psychology at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich (Germany) and received a trophy, a certificate and a cheque for 1000€.

In general, Maren is interested in understanding how the sense of agency – the perceived control over our actions and their effects – influences decision-making and learning during goal-directed behavior.

In her awarded publication, “My choice, my actions: self-determination, not instrumental value of outcomes enhances outcome monitoring during learning“, she and her co-authors investigated how the freedom to choose affects how people process the outcomes of their actions. Specifically, they looked at whether stronger brain responses to feedback are due to having made a self-determined choice or because the outcomes help guide future actions.

For more details, see the original abstract (below) and don’t miss out on reading the full publication.

Brain Products Young Scientist Award 2025 presented to Maren Giersiepen

Brain Products Young Scientist Award Winner 2025: Maren Giersiepen

Abstract

Maren Giersiepen, Simone Schütz-Bosbach, Jakob Kaiser.
My choice, my actions: self-determination, not instrumental value of outcomes enhances outcome monitoring during learning
Cerebral Cortex, Volume 34, Issue 8, August 2024, bhae325, https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhae325

Freedom of choice enhances our sense of agency. During goal-directed behavior, the freedom to choose between different response options increases the neural processing of positive and negative feedback, indicating enhanced outcome monitoring under conditions of high agency experience. However, it is unclear whether this enhancement is predominantly driven by an increased salience of self- compared to externally determined action outcomes or whether differences in the perceived instrumental value of outcomes contribute to outcome monitoring in goal-directed tasks. To test this, we recorded electroencephalography while participants performed a reinforcement learning task involving free choices, action-relevant forced choices, and action-irrelevant forced choices. We observed larger midfrontal theta power and N100 amplitudes for feedback following free choices compared with action-relevant and action-irrelevant forced choices. In addition, a Reward Positivity was only present for free but not forced choice outcomes. Crucially, our results indicate that enhanced outcome processing is not driven by the relevance of outcomes for future actions but rather stems from the association of outcomes with recent self-determined choice. Our findings highlight the pivotal role of self-determination in tracking the consequences of our actions and contribute to an understanding of the cognitive processes underlying the choice-induced facilitation in outcome monitoring.

On behalf of the whole Brain Products team, congratulations, Maren, on winning our Young Scientist Award 2025. We will continue to follow your research and wish you all the best for your future!

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Reference

Maren Giersiepen, Simone Schütz-Bosbach, Jakob Kaiser.
My choice, my actions: self-determination, not instrumental value of outcomes enhances outcome monitoring during learning
Cerebral Cortex, Volume 34, Issue 8, August 2024, bhae325, https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhae325