Our review about methods used in Heartbeat Evoked Responses research is out at Psychophysiology ✨!
We hope it will be a helpful resource for the community:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
It’s not a fix for APCs, but it does challenge the gatekeeping model.
And regardless of whether it’s perfect, I think it’s important that a high-profile journal is willing to take that kind of risk.
eLife is one of the first high-profile journals to sacrifice its impact factor over principles.
as eLife states: "What would happen if a journal lost its impact factor for its values, rather than its behaviour? "
New eLife editorial: their Publish-Review-Curate model works, even after losing the impact factor.
I published with them because I believed in their approach.
Scientific publishing needs more courage to embrace change
...especially in times of peer-review crisis.
However, despite achieving correlations higher than other ML-based models, there’s still room for improvement.
Stay tuned to see how far we can push EEG-based decoding of striatal reward signals in future work!
The model’s predictions also showed anatomical specificity (ventral striatum) and functional validity (win-loss modulations).
Results show promising predictive accuracy: the model-derived predictions correlated with the true fMRI BOLD timeseries at mean r = 0.32.
In this work, we trained a CNN (based on Kovalev et al., 2022) to predict ventral striatal fMRI-BOLD signals from simultaneously recorded EEG.
Here we gooo!
Will fMRI become obsolete for measuring striatal reward signals?
Probably not anytime soon…
Still, in our latest paper, we use AI to take a step toward decoding striatal reward signals from EEG — maybe nudging the fMRI monopoly just a little :)
direct.mit.edu/imag/article...
Such a cool and rigorous paper by @studenova.bsky.social !
bsky.app/profile/stud...
How dynamics arise from the structure is my biggest interest. In this study, we started with a small step and asked how structure constrains dynamics. Spoiler: would that it were so simple… (1/6)
Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky academic.oup.com/icb/article-...
Woop woop 🎉 Excited to share that our paper has been accepted in Imaging Neuroscience!
Can ventral striatal reward signals — originating from deep within the brain — be reconstructed from scalp EEG?
We tried to answer this question using deep learning.
More soon 👀 Stay tuned.
On #InternationalDayOfWomenAndGirlsInScience, this article hit me: more children are drawing scientists as women than ever before. Yay! 🎉
🤔 But still only ~30%.
Progress, yes.
Equality, not yet.
www.science.org/content/arti...
@cbsopenscience.bsky.social great opportunity to connect over open science in Leipzig coming up!
If oscillations are modulated in amplitude from trial to trial, and those oscillations have a non-zero mean, they "create" an evoked response. It is a baseline-shift mechanism for ERP/ERF generation. Here is a simulated example of how alpha oscillations may generate readiness potential.
#brainmovies
I have been trying to simulate event-related alpha amplitude decrease with the Jansen-Rit model. Turns out adding external inhibitory input abolishes alpha. Pretty obvious. But how does it agree with more alpha = more inhibition?
#brainmovies
Heute noch Thema Vereinbarkeit (Familie & Beruf). Das ist mir auch deshalb wichtig, weil ich selbst als Doktorandin so gut wie keine Professorinnen mit Kind(ern) als Vorbild hatte, mir das aber gewünscht hätte. Meine Karriere sieht auf dem Papier jetzt wie ein "Vorzeigemodell" für Vereinbarkeit aus.
main goal for this year: find a new job! 🙂
looking for a role with fun & complex technical challenges & within a great community. my main expertise is in signal processing/EEG/MEG, but topic-wise I am quite flexible.
science/industry both great! starting mid-year. nschawor.github.io/cv
Richard McElreath: It must not be overlooked that junior researchers DO NOT TRUST US. We, the directors, are a big part of the problem. We made this system, we remake it every year, and we benefit from it. What can we do to credibly signal our commitment to reform a corrupt research culture? My conversations with junior scientists in the society has taught me that directors are too often either indifferent or hostile to science reform. We cannot hope to convince our prize winning colleagues. Their egos are immune. But we can replace retirements with researchers who care more about integrity than their own prestige. This is important both for earning the trust of the junior researchers who really do the research in the MPG and for attracting excellent future directors and starting to earn the trust of the public. So I suggest two strong signals to our junior researchers (and the public): (1) we will reform recruitment and promotion at all levels to eliminate proxies like citation counts and journal brands in favor of reliability and sustainability; (2) we will make open science skills a core part of scientific training, through the graduate schools at a minimum, as conditions for the central funding. The most ambitious thing we could do, as hinted at in item 5 above, is to meaningfully invest in metascientific research. As the largest basic research organization in the world, the MPG is uniquely suited to studying research and its products from a broad perspective that includes the humanities, the sciences, and policy. Governments are already involved in science reform. Someone should study it in an organized and sustained way.
The Max Planck Society has begun an exploratory round table for open science. We are drafting some recommendations to leadership. Still a long way to go! But here are my notes on the most recent draft, just so you all know how I am trying to steer things.
It’s not too late to apply for the PhD position in my lab! Please send your documents (cover letter, CV, transcripts, names of references) through the official application platform by Nov 25!
Please share! - 🚨⚠️ PhD position alert ⚠️🚨 - Please share!
Come work with @ldeserno.bsky.social and yours truly on an exciting DFG-funded project on the neurocognitive mechanisms of (noise in) learning and decision-making in development and ADHD!
Photograph of a half-eaten jam doughnut. Image by Alexander Fox | PlaNet Fox from Pixabay.
Is overeating driven by hedonism? @danasmall.bsky.social &co argue that the pleasure of eating food is not a driver of the #obesity epidemic, but rather the regular consumption of an unhealthy diet blunts sensitivity to interoceptive signals that drive food reward #neurosky 🧪
plos.io/4nTlHQc
Wer in der Wissenschaft als exzellent gelten will, muss sichtbar sein. Nur: Frauen werden für Sichtbarkeit abgestraft. Sie können es schlicht nicht richtig machen! Kein Wunder, dass Gleichstellung im dt. Wissenschaftssystem schleppend vorangeht. Das #Sichtbarkeitsparadox: heute in #ArbeitInDerWiss!
View from your office onto Giessen and surrounding villages.
Please repost! I am looking for a PhD candidate in the area of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience to start in early 2026.
The position is funded as part of the Excellence Cluster "The Adaptive Mind" at @jlugiessen.bsky.social.
Please apply here until Nov 25:
www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...
Big shake-up for dopamine theory?
This new @NatureComms paper argues that VTA dopamine isn’t signaling reward prediction error but instead modulates force and performance.
If true, it decouples learning from motivation and puts pressure on decades of RPE-based models.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Fresh from the press 🍃
In this article, we put forward a framework for understanding goal-directed and habitual control. We propose how interactive loops in the brain & shortcuts between them may shape our behavior – and that of Transformers. Looking forward to your thoughts💡
doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...
Functional connectivity (FC) is driven by 1/f. The approach: compute FC as usual, compute FC only with ROI where oscillations are 'present', then compare. Alpha lives, but not other bands. Idk, seems overstated. If beta comes in bursts: no peak, but could be FC
doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1041-25.2025
