Franziska Knolle

Great work led by Daria & Greta showing that diverse agreement types draw on shared units (even across languages)!

Fair human-centric image dataset for ethical AI benchmarking - Nature The Fair Human-Centric Image Benchmark (FHIBE, pronounced ‘Feebee’)—an image dataset that implements best practices for consent, privacy, compensation, safety, diversity and utility—can be used respon...

All AI models are constrained by the quality of their data. A recent @nature.com paper introduces the Fair Human-Centric Image Benchmark (FHIBE), a diverse dataset implementing best practices for consent, privacy, compensation, safety and utility. 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

For more context, see also the @nature.com News & Views article about this work, where I unpack what it means when genetic risk for psychiatric disorders overlaps with normal-range traits, including some positive associations with education-related outcomes: rdcu.be/eT4U7

Mapping the genetic landscape across 14 psychiatric disorders - Nature Genomic analyses applied to 14 childhood- and adult-onset psychiatric disorders identifies five underlying genomic factors that explain the majority of the genetic variance of the individual disorders...

1/4 Thrilled to be sharing new work published today in Nature describing the third wave of results from the PGC Cross-Disorder Group. This reflects a massive group effort to examine shared and unique genetic signal across >1 million cases for 14 psychiatric disorders. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

International Consortium on Hallucination Research Visit the post for more.

Save the Date: The next ICHR Satellite Meeting will be in Munich, Sep 21-24 2026!

Hosted by @franziskaknolle.bsky.social & co-organised with @echrhallucinations.bsky.social, this will be our 5th satellite meeting and first trip to Germany.

hallucinationconsortium.org

Rapid computation of high-level visual surprise Health sciences

High-level visual surprise is rapidly integrated during perceptual inference!

🚨 New paper 🚨 out now in @cp-iscience.bsky.social with @paulapena.bsky.social and @mruz.bsky.social

www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Summary 🧵 below 👇

Language-network connectivity and cortical glutamate and their associations with overweighted semantic prior beliefs, schizotypy and task-based hallucinations Background: Impairments in language comprehension and production are core symptoms of schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD). Predictive processing, a Bayesian framework of brain function, provides an...

🚨New preprint looking at neurobiological and computational mechanisms underlying altered language-related predictive processing and subclinical symptom formation in a schizotypy sample!
Great work by medical student Verena Demler! 🎉🧠
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

Our symposium on speech expectations and hallucinations was accepted at SIRS in Florence next March! @aldersonday.bsky.social @franziskaknolle.bsky.social
Judy Thompson, Izabele Batkovskyte and I will present #SIRS2026

Psoriasis-related neuroinflammation disrupts thalamostriatal signalling driving anhedonia in both humans and mice Inflammation is implicated in 25% of depression cases, yet limited access to human brain for mechanistic studies and scarce translational models have hindered the identification of neural circuits lin...

Final #neuroskyence preprint of the year! We updated our big neuroinflammation project, studying psoriasis-like inflammation in both humans and mice. Main take-home: we see impaired thalamostriatal signalling in humans and mice alongside depression / anhedonia.

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

Transcranial Focused Ultrasound for Identifying the Neural Substrate of Conscious Perception Identifying what aspects of brain activity are responsible for conscious perception remains one of the most challenging problems in science. While pro…

New paper: Transcranial Focused Ultrasound for Identifying the Neural Substrate of Conscious Perception. With Dan Freeman, @brianodegaard.bsky.social, and Seung-Schik Yoo. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I am very excited to share our new preprint, spearheaded by the brilliant @lunahuestegge.bsky.social, w/ @peterkok.bsky.social and others: ‘An attempt to push mental imagery over the reality threshold using non-invasive brain stimulation’

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Sensory reformatting for a working visual memory A core function of visual working memory (WM) is to sustain mental representations of recent visual inputs, thereby bridging moments of experience. This is thought to occur in part by recruiting early...

new paper in TICS officially out today. great learning from and writing with Anastasia, and super cool cover art from Prof. Pinar Yoldas.
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Body ownership is not constructed unconsciously and then brought to awareness—it emerges directly in consciousness. A fundamental insight for understanding the bodily self, with clear implications for theories of consciousness. See PNAS article and thread below.

Ventral Tegmental Area dopamine neurons regulated by Parabrachial Nucleus mediate long-term aversive memory Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA) dopamine neurons are intermixed with glutamate and GABA neurons, which had been implicated in aversion. While it is unclear the neuronal circuitry involved in regulation…

How do parabrachial nucleus 🧠 neurons relay threat ⚠️ information to ventral tegmental area dopamine neurons to influence long-term aversive memory 🤔 ?

Angebot: Ein Tag als Neurowissenschaftlerin München | 23. April 2026, 09:00 | TUM Klinikum, Neuroradiologie, München mit Dr. Franziska Knolle

🚨lf you’re based in Munich and have a daughter or friends with one, this might be interesting to them! Experience a day as a neuroscientist 🧠💡we’re very excited to show the girls around and introduce them to our work!!! 🤩 www.girls-day.de/.oO/Show/tum...

Shared and language-specific phonological processing in the human temporal lobe - Nature The human superior temporal gyrus processes acoustic–phonetic properties of speech regardless of whether the language is familiar to the listener, but only encodes word boundaries and language-sp...

What aspects of language are universal, and which are due to familiarity? A @nature.com paper finds that while STG shows shared responses to basic speech sounds, only native language boosts encoding of word boundaries + sound-sequence stats 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Neural dynamics outside task-coding dimensions drive decision trajectories through transient amplification Most behaviors involve neural dynamics in high-dimensional activity spaces. A common approach is to extract dimensions that capture task-related variability, such as those separating stimuli or choice...

“Our findings challenge the conventional focus on low-dimensional coding subspaces as a sufficient framework for understanding neural computations, demonstrating that dimensions previously considered task-irrelevant and accounting for little variance can have a critical role in driving behavior.”

Qualities of felt presence are described

🥳!!NEW PREPRINT!!🥳

We show that the tendency to compress complex social information into priors about social structures becomes more pronounced during adolescence.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

I am soooooo excited to share this work, together with @mkwittmann.bsky.social and @yongling.bsky.social.

Figure shows analyses of dendritic spine densities in unaffected individuals, including tissue sections (V1, PPC, DLPFC) labeled for spinophilin/phalloidin, distribution of spine volumes, and spine densities by region across small, medium and large volumes.

Individuals with schizophrenia exhibit region-specific reductions in dendritic spine densities across cortical regions involved in visual-spatial working memory. ja.ma/48dYiTW

Really excited about this 5-year project starting, funded by @wellcometrust.bsky.social, where we will combine ✨computational modelling✨ with causal intervention techniques such as ✨tFUS✨ to study the neurocognitive mechanisms of repetitive negative thoughts 🚀 led by @mikebrowning.bsky.social

There are 3 Oxford-based post doc positions for this Wellcome Trust project that will be advertised soon!

If you have experinece in neurostimulation (tms/tus) and/or modelling of cogneuro data in humans do contact one of us (me, @mkflugge.bsky.social @lilweb.bsky.social, Jacinta OShea) to discuss!

Estrogen modulates reward prediction errors and reinforcement learning - Nature Neuroscience Dopamine encoding of reward prediction errors naturally fluctuates over females’ reproductive cycles with estrogenic signaling due to reduced expression of dopamine reuptake proteins.

Thrilled to share our new paper, out now in @natneuro.nature.com, uncovering how estradiol, the most potent estrogen, modulates reinforcement learning and reward prediction errors across biological levels. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#blueprint 1/7

Adaptive stretching of representations across brain regions and deep learning model layers - Nature Communications How the brain adapts its representations to prioritize task-relevant information remains unclear. Here, the authors show that both monkey brains and deep learning models stretch neural representations...

New paper! Brains stretch representations along task-relevant dimensions. Spike timing is important.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroscience

Interested in the evolution of human language? Check out our new paper in @science.org where we synthesize latest findings and outline a multifaceted, bio-cultural approach for studying how language evolved. Super proud of this work, and hoping it leads to exciting new research! tinyurl.com/ykacvanp

Happy to share my new paper published in @nathumbehav.nature.com: A critical look at statistical power in computational modeling studies, particularly those based on model selection.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A habit and working memory model as an alternative account of human reward-based learning Nature Human Behaviour - In this study, Collins proposes an alternative dual-process (working memory and habit) model of reinforcement learning in humans.

My paper is out!
Computational modeling of error patterns during reward-based learning show evidence that habit learning (value free!) supplements working memory in 7 human data sets.
rdcu.be/eQjLN

The Change from 2020 tab is particularly interesting, given the narratives about what happened.

Computational signatures of uncertainty are reflected in motor cortex excitatory neurochemistry - Nature Communications Using computational modelling and neurochemical analysis, this study shows how motor cortex excitatory signals guide belief updating and adaptive learning in uncertain environments.

Then we have a new paper led by Nazia Jassim @naziajassim.bsky.social on the neurochemical markers of uncertainty processing and links to trait anxiety: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

@natcomms.nature.com

The relationship between anxious traits and learning about changes in stochasticity and volatility Author summary Adapting to changes in our environment is a daily endeavour. To do so, humans and animals alike make use of feedback to guide future actions. Uncertainty in the environment can arise fr...

First up, this paper led by Bronagh McCoy: journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

When noise and volatility are independently manipulated people behave differently depending on their anxious traits.