Romy Lorenz

Dense Phenotyping of Human Brain Network Organization Using Precision fMRI The advent of noninvasive imaging methods like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) transformed cognitive neuroscience, providing insights into large-scale brain networks and their link to cog...

My review with @caterinagratton.bsky.social is (apparently) open access for those who couldn't see it before:

www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

We discuss individual differences in brain network organization and how to home in on and talk about commonalities in the face of such differences

🚀 We’re hiring - Join our lab 🚀

🔍 Hiring: PhD (75% TV-L) & Postdoc (100% TV-L)
🧠 fMRI, VR, EEG, modelling

We combine a range of cognitive neuroscience methods to study flexible behaviour.

📅 Start: Feb 2026 or later | ⏳ Apply by Nov 3!

More details:
tinyurl.com/ms3a9ajt

#CognitiveNeuroscience

** We have up to TWO funded PhD positions available in our lab!! Apply below to find new ways to enhance memory👇 Pls retweet **

Deadline: 2nd December

1. Cross-species closed-loopTMR: tinyurl.com/bddu4tp6

2. TUS and TMR in humans:
tinyurl.com/jjws5ctj

Happy to chat to interested applicants.

Early career group leaders We appoint researchers from across biology and biomedicine to set up their first groups at the Crick.

The @crick.ac.uk is recruiting Early Career Group Leaders

- Lab set-up, research costs, salaries for up to 5 researchers
- Support for up to 12 years
- Access to our core facilities
- Competitive salary
- Fantastic colleagues
- All areas of biology

Deadline 27 Nov

www.crick.ac.uk/careers-stud...

A core function of cortex is predicting what happens next given the world's state.

This recent paper from Oxford shows how cortical layers may use a delay trick to learn to predict.

A simple illustration can explain the idea.

A🧵with my toy model and notes:

#neuroskyence #compneuro #NeuroAI

📣 New preprint from the Braga Lab! 📣

The ventral visual stream for reading converges on the transmodal language network

Congrats to Dr. Joe Salvo for this epic set of results

Big Q: What brain systems support the translation of writing to concepts and meaning?

Thread 🧵 ⬇️

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Jingyuan E. Chen, Jonathan R. Polimeni, et al:

Differentiating BOLD and non-BOLD signals in fMRI time series using cross-cortical depth delay patterns

doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

We’re looking for a postdoc to join our Max Planck group in Germany some time in 2026. If you have computational and/or neuroimaging expertise, and are interested in questions intersecting perception and cognition, please reach out! I’ll also be happy to chat at the #Bernsteinconference this week.

Our new paper is out now in Neuron! 🎉 With @vaibhavtripathi.bsky.social @maxwellelliott.bsky.social Joanna Ladopoulou, Wendy Sun, Mark Eldaief, and Randy Buckner

Paper link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Very excited for this year Bernstein! @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social

We'll bring a bunch of new work, here's a thread with the summaries.

Please check them out if you are interested in (low rank) RNN and distributed computations.

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

There is going to be an exiting workshop on advanced fMRI end of October in Erice, Sicily (Italy).

The agenda looks just at great as the location.

ismrbf.marbilab.eu/events/7-xiv...

Wohooo congrats!

We recently also replicated this FPN fractionation in densely- sampled subjects at 7T and found this FPN subnetwork to strongly couple with the dorsolateral DMN subnetwork.

It’s an FPN subnetwork: at rest, it couples more strongly with the rest of the FPN than with the DMN. During some tasks it shifts toward the DMN, but for cognitive control it ramps up connectivity with the FPN. Good reference: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Amazing, thanks so much! Will reach out via email!

I am planning to do the same in my lab - would love to hear more how you decided to design such a session!

Replicability isn’t just a VASO issue — it’s a challenge across the (laminar) fMRI field. However, I argue that low SNR makes VASO especially hard: tricky to detect signal and even harder to replicate. I’m not pushing GE-BOLD for laminar fMRI, but “just use VASO” oversimplifies the current problems.

Compared to laminar MVPA in GE-BOLD, these are not many studies :) I know your work (RSA in Kenshu paper), Polina's preprint + Daniel's preprint (where it becomes evident that decoding with VASO is hard and in his case looks similar to GE-BOLD on the group level). Is Insub Kim's work published yet?

If replication isn’t possible due to physiology/attention, we’d be giving up on replicability as a field. Did you engage with our paper and the original? Attention is measured via task performance, and the original study showed very large effects in individuals, so replication is a fair expectation.

does someone good at coding & analysis want to work remotely w/ us in the coming few months (before end of 2025), as a paid consultant? project will be on neurofeedback (fMRI, ECoG, calcium imaging). we'll work towards developing the experiments & analysis pipelines together. if so pls DM me ur CV🧠📈

I haven't seen that many papers yet using MVPA in VASO. With respect to our replication study, main thing is the ROI selection I would say and not segmentation issues as we did a lot of control analyses including manual segmentation.

Challenges in replicating layer-specificity of working memory processes in human dlPFC Although working memory reliably activates the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), the functional significance of its distinct cytoarchitectonic layers is not well understood in humans. A recent f...

Also we can't replicate important VASO findings. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We haven’t managed to get reliable decoding with VASO yet, even for simple contrasts. My sense is that most of the field will continue to rely on GE-BOLD for MVPA, which is exactly why we thought our paper might be useful!

Challenges in replicating layer-specificity of working memory processes in human dlPFC Although working memory reliably activates the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), the functional significance of its distinct cytoarchitectonic layers is not well understood in humans. A recent f...

It's not that easy - due to extremely low SNR in VASO, so far we were not able to decode even very simple task contrasts with VASO. In addition, we can't replicate important VASO findings. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Run don’t walk to the #Neuro4Pros summer school if it happens again and you’re an early career prof

Thanks again for the absolute best time ⭐️ @gunnarblohm.bsky.social @kordinglab.bsky.social @yaelniv.bsky.social @meganakpeters.bsky.social @patrickmineault.bsky.social, and Hannah Bayer

For the laminauts. @layerfmri.bsky.social

What started as a journal club on layer decoding turned into a project thanks to @karolisdegutis.bsky.social. Our preprint challenges a widespread assumption in the field: MVPA is not immune to vascular confounds in laminar GE-BOLD decoding, as shown using a mechanistic laminar response model.