Aleksandra Piejka

Trying to build an experiment in Unity and slowly losing your patience?
Spoiler: that’s completely normal!

Meet EDIA - a modular framework for building studies in Unity.
🧩 Reusable modules
📊 Data sync
🕶️ Multi-headset support

And yes, a “Find Waldo” demo is included - because science should be fun!

In some way, it's trivial:

The #brain & the rest of the #body (e.g. the #heart) are coupled.

Yet, we spelled it out
w/ A. Villringer & V. Nikulin for current scientists (below)
w/ @martager.bsky.social @agatapatyczek.bsky.social @el-rei.bsky.social for future scientists bsky.app/profile/mart...

Frontiers | AffectTracker: real-time continuous rating of affective experience in immersive virtual reality Subjective experience is key to understanding affective states, characterized by valence and arousal. Traditional experiments using post-stimulus summary rat...

📢Our peer-reviewed article about the AffectTracker is finally out! 😲🕹️📈
Traditional methods for rating emotion often miss the dynamic, moment-to-moment nature of feelings. We designed a tool to capture this continuous affective experience in real-time during dynamic emotional stimulation.

The Body’s Band: How Heart and Brain Communicate Illustration of a person with vitiligo practicing yoga, sitting cross-legged and stretching an arm over their head. In a thought bubble, a smiling brain sings into a microphone and a heart plays a dru...

🧠🫀 New from our lab on Frontiers for Young Minds:

Ever wondered how the heart and brain communicate? Think the heart as the drummer 🥁 & the brain as the singer 🎤 keeping the body's band in tune!

Read here (for ages 8–15): kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frym.2025.1536787/full
[1/2]

Please consider donating to this initiative or any other - it's the least we can do

We are super happy to announce the fourth edition of School of Ideas in Neuroscience! Come to Warsaw in September for in-depth talks, discussions and workshops that will help you to make sense of your data! The deadline for registration is July 21, 2025.

Pre-stimulus beta power mediates explicit and implicit perceptual biases in distinct cortical areas - Communications Psychology Two EEG studies in healthy human adults suggest that choice history and stimulus probability-induced biases in somatosensory perception are reflected in distinct prestimulus beta power modulations acr...

Check out my published PhD work including links to analysis code and EEG data (n=83): www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Big thank you to my co-authors, the editor and the reviewers.

I'm very honored and happy to share that our project "Science Streets" received the Science Communication award from the @biodgps-dgpa.bsky.social!

Together with Laura Mayer, we will officially kick 🦵 off with the preparations!

More exciting news about Science Streets will follow soon!

That’s a wrap for the MBE group at #PuG2025!

@martager.bsky.social closed things out with a deep dive into how cardio-respiratory phase biases in voluntary action initiation might shape our sense of agency differently for actions vs. outcomes 🫀🫁🧠

See you next year in Heidelberg!

Day 2 of #PuG2025 was closed off by @michaelgaebler.com, diving into the advances and challenges of increasing the neurocognitive realism of virtual faces, from behavioural to EEG to VR studies 👤🧠👓

@agatapatyczek.bsky.social has a gift for science communication. If you happen to be in Leipzig, don’t miss the Long Night of Science tonight at @mpicbs.bsky.social from 21:00 to midnight

A cool experience of how our internal bodily signals can shape sounds and visuals 🫁🫀🎧

Next on the IGOR Symposium at #PuG2025 is @martager.bsky.social in lieu of @alinakoppold.bsky.social presenting latest results on what and how data transformation practices are used with psychophysiological data, and how these impact effect sizes and reliability 🧠

Preregistration: osf.io/tjax9/

Our next MBE group event for today is a poster presentation by @alexandroskas.bsky.social during Poster Session B, on how to improve eyewitness accuracy using 3D interactive lineups in VR 👁️🕵️‍♀️

🗓️ Fri, June 20 | 13:00-14:30
📍2.XXX Z6 (second floor)

#PuG2025

Don’t miss our MBE group events today! We start with Poster Session B with @flxklotz.bsky.social’s poster B208, introducing EDIA as a tool to design VR experiments in Unity with ease 🧠👓

🗓️ Fri, June 20 | 13:00-14:30
📍2.XXX Z6 (second floor)

Next week at this time, @pug2025.bsky.social will be in full swing.

My fellow @mbe-lab.bsky.social colleagues and I are very much looking forward to it!

@martager.bsky.social
@flxklotz.bsky.social
@aleksanpi.bsky.social
@alexandroskas.bsky.social in person, the rest through our reports.

We continued the Neurology retreat with a workshop session "How to do science in the 21st century", co-led by @michaelgaebler.com @martager.bsky.social @aleksanpi.bsky.social @agatapatyczek.bsky.social & Jenny Mutu, inspired by the materials of @anne-urai.bsky.social & @clarekelly.bsky.social

This morning we started our Neurology retreat with a kickoff talk by @clarekelly.bsky.social on rethinking academia in a time of climate crisis. Many thought-provoking insights that will help us identify some concrete actions to take in our department in the following workshop part 🌍

Attending #PuG2025 in Würzburg this year? Check out the detailed program and see if you can spot our own Mind-Body-Emotion contributions including @michaelgaebler.com @flxklotz.bsky.social @aleksanpi.bsky.social @martager.bsky.social @alexandroskas.bsky.social 🔍

More details soon!

Tools and Software

We centralized our open-science contributions in a new "Tools & Software" section on our website; check out

- open stimuli (eg. 3D objects)
- open data (eg. MindBrainBody)
- tools (eg. excite-o-meter, AffectTracker)
- analysis scripts
- & more

www.cbs.mpg.de/departments/...

#researchtransparency

We are coming to Psychologie und Gihirn 2024 (PUG) in Hamburg! Come chat with us! See the some teezers in the comments 💬 #PuG2024