Short Biography

Jakob studied Physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich. During his PhD with Kevan A.C. Martin at the Institute for Neuroinformatics (ETH, Zürich, Switzerland) he developed a layered cortical microcircuit model of the frontal eye fields, a brain region important for the control of eye movement in primates. Jakob then moved to Berlin where he worked with John-Dylan Haynes and developed and applied novel methods to study multivariate and information theoretical aspects of brain connectivity with fMRI. Since 2012, Jakob is a Senior Researcher and Head of Laboratories at the Translational Neuromodeling Unit.

Scientific interest

The human brain has an astonishing capacity to control and guide behavior. The neuronal computations that are required for this rely on interactions between populations of neurons. I use mathematical models to understand these cortical computations, how they are performed by the underlying neuronal network and how they might be altered in psychiatric diseases. Hence, I focus on tasks which could provide potential biomarkers in psychiatric diseases such as for example the antisaccade task or saccadic adaptation for eye movements, or predictive coding in sensory hierarchies. The models are used to predict fMRI as well as eye movement data. I also develop methods to analyse high-resolution, layered fMRI to study layered cortical computations in the same tasks.

Selected Publications

Modeling Eye Movements

 

Computational Dissociation of Dopaminergic and Cholinergic Effects on Action Selection and Inhibitory Control, Aponte EA, Schöbi D, Stephan KE, Heinzle J, Biological Psychiatry: CNNI, 2020; 5:364-372; Download link

Switch Costs in Inhibitory Control and Voluntary Behaviour: A Computational Study of the Antisaccade Task. Aponte EA, Stephan KE, Heinzle J, European Journal of Neuroscience, 2019; 50:3205-3220; Download link

Inhibition failures and late errors in the antisaccade task: Influence of cue delay.  Aponte EA, Tschan D, Stephan KE, Heinzle J. Journal of Neurophysiology, 2019; 120(6):3001-3016

The Stochastic Early Reaction, Inhibition, and late Action (SERIA) model for antisaccades. Aponte EA, Schöbi D, Stephan KE, Heinzle J. PLoS Comput Biol. 2017; 13(8):e1005692. Download link

Computational models of eye movements and their application to schizophrenia. Heinzle J, Aponte E, Stephan KE. Curr Opin Behav Sci. 2016; 11:21-29

A biologically realistic cortical model of eye movement control in reading. Heinzle J, Hepp K, Martin KA. Psychol Rev. 2010; 117(3):808-30.

A microcircuit model of the frontal eye fields. Heinzle J, Hepp K, Martin KA. J Neurosci. 2007; 27(35):9341-53.

fMRI Analysis and Application

A hemodynamic model for layered BOLD signals. Heinzle J, Koopmans PJ, den Ouden HE, Raman S, Stephan KE. Neuroimage. 2016;125:556-70.

mpdcm: A toolbox for massively parallel dynamic causal modeling. Aponte EA, Raman S, Sengupta B, Penny WD, Stephan KE, Heinzle J. J Neurosci Methods. 2016;257:7-16.

Visuomotor functional network topology predicts upcoming tasks. Heinzle J, Wenzel MA, Haynes JD. J Neurosci. 2012;32(29):9960-8.

Topographically specific functional connectivity between visual field maps in the human brain. Heinzle J, Kahnt T, Haynes JD. Neuroimage. 2011;56(3):1426-36.

 

See all publications of Jakob Heinzle at Pubmed or at Google Schoolar

Code

Microcircuit model of the FEF

A microcircuit model of the frontal eye fields. Heinzle J, Hepp K, Martin KA. J Neurosci. 2007;27(35):9341-53.

Download Code

A biologically realistic cortical model of eye movement control in reading. Heinzle J, Hepp K, Martin KA. Psychol Rev. 2010;117(3):808-30.

Download Code