Anna-Lena Eckert

Thank you to everyone at TAM for creating such a collaborative & supportive environment over the years.

The DFG excellence upgrade will be huge - if you are looking for PhD/ post-doc opportunities, def check here:

www.theadaptivemind.de

Happy to chat about my experience there as well

Piloting a VR experiment in a funny looking motion capture suit

Farewell & christmas party with the lab

Today marks my last day @ MR theoretical neuro lab 👋🥲

Deeply grateful to Dominik & team for everything I learned here. Spent my last week pushing to finish things, VR piloting & farewell partying.

Exciting things ahead - super thrilled to join @drrickadams.bsky.social lab at UCL in January!

🚀🎓We have exciting opportunities at the PhD and Postdoc level, including in the new Simons Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience, a 10-year initiative spanning a powerful international network of labs working across species and disciplines - please reach out if interested
bsky.app/profile/simo...

Postdoc opportunity @uni-konstanz.de, @uni-freiburg.de, @unituebingen.bsky.social for ECRs who can't continue their research in the US: www.uni-konstanz.de/zukunftskoll...

We are excited to announce that the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience meeting (CCN 2026) will be held at New York University from August 3–6, 2026.
2026.ccneuro.org

Enjoyed reading this post. Funny enough we had a pretty lively debate on this in our last labmeeting. I was one of the folks defending theory w/out data, so it resonated a lot 😅

"But some of the most important papers don't explain data, they restructure the space of possible explanations"

A beautiful summary of our paper! Thank you @neurosock.bsky.social

New today in @Nature: your visual cortex contains touch-based body maps. bit.ly/VisualBodyMaps
Your brain transforms what you see into first-person, body-referenced codes: A previously unknown bridge between vision and touch.

Flugsteuer muss bleiben – jetzt Appell unterzeichnen Die Koalitionsspitzen wollen die Flugsteuer senken – auf Kosten des Klimas. Das müssen wir verhindern!

✈️ Die Koalitionsspitzen wollen die Flugsteuer senken – und gleichzeitig wird das Deutschlandticket teurer. Statt Billigflüge zu subventionieren, sollten sie lieber in die marode Bahn investieren und für günstige Zugtickets sorgen. Jetzt Appell unterzeichnen ➡️ aktion.campact.de/s/flugsteuer...

What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma.

It's *scientific publishing*.

We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing.

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_...

Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇

This work is now out in Nature Communications! 🎉

Computational signatures of uncertainty are reflected in motor cortex excitatory neurochemistry: www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64702-6

Huge thanks to our amazing team! @beckyneuro.bsky.social @campsydept.bsky.social @camneuro.bsky.social

Merz’ rassistische Ablenkung hat Tradition Die Stadtbild-Debatte ist nicht nur ein Schauspiel des Alltagsrassismus in Deutschland, sondern auch ein Ablenkungsmanöver: Unzufriedenheit soll sich an Ausländern entladen statt an der Politik, die d...

Merz Stadtbild-Aussage ist nicht nur rassistisch, sondern auch ein Ablenkungsmanöver: Unzufriedenheit soll sich an "Ausländern" entladen statt an der Politik, die versagt, lebenswerte Städte für alle zu schaffen. @keremschamberger.bsky.social @jacobinmagazin.bsky.social

Hippocampus supports multi-task reinforcement learning under partial observability - Nature Communications Neural mechanisms underlying reinforcement learning in naturalistic environments are not fully understood. Here authors show that reinforcement learning (RL) agents with hippocampal-like recurrence, u...

How does the brain find its way in realistic environments? 🧠 Using deep RL and neural data, we show that hippocampal-like networks support navigation, learning, and generalisation in partially observable environments—mirroring real animal behaviour. Now out:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroAI

Young lives cut short on an unimaginable scale: the 18,457 children on Gaza’s list of war dead Every name on a list compiled by health authorities in Gaza of the child victims of Israel’s offensive

no words

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

Post doc job alert 📢! Announcing a v exciting job on a Wellcome-funded project in my group at UCL, looking at auditory hallucinations... Advert here 👀: rb.gy/230w8l - deadline is end of Oct. Please apply! 1/5

Ayooo 👾 this is great, congratulations!! 😊🎉

[logging on every day] man what

My amazing husband Majed worked *so hard* on this project for >5 years - finally published today @natcomms.nature.com 😍

Absolutely insane array of methods, looking at microglia proliferation patterns & cell-cell interactions after stroke. Proud moment! 💫

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Big congrats to Marishka on this. I know how much time and effort went into it. Really happy to see it out! For those interested, she replicated prior longitudinal results using an approach-avoidance conflict task and showed how model parameters afforded out-of-sample clinical prediction.

Explaining the hollow mask illusion at the science fair: We do not perceive the "inside" (concave) of the mask, but it pops out and we perceive it as if it were a normal (convex) mask. Very quirky brains!

Demonstrating the rubber hand illusion (a rather improvised version of it) to some young experimentalists at the science fair

Science demos at the town fair in Marburg this Saturday 🧑‍🔬💫

Talking to Marburgers of all ages about the quirks of perception, & introducing the new DFG-funded cluster of excellence "The Adaptive Mind".

We showed Ames room, a color constancy demo, and hollow mask, size-weight & rubber hand illusions

https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/pages/call-for-papers-computational-markers

Thrilled to share that @cognemo.bsky.social and I are guest editors for a Schizophrenia Bulletin special issue on Computational markers of psychosis: From latent states to neurobiological mechanisms 🧠✨
If you’re working on this topic, we’d love to see your work!
academic.oup.com/schizophreni...

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...

The two key studies of the International Brain Laboratory @intlbrainlab.bsky.social are out today!

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Computational postdoc ad for KCL funded by the Wellcome Trust on the NEPTUNE project

🧠 We're hiring a computational postdoc!

3+ years with me & @mitulamehta.bsky.social on @wellcometrust.bsky.social funded social cognition/paranoia research at the IoPPN.

Lead & develop computational work, collaborate with experimentalists on psychosis/THC data.

DM for details! lnkd.in/eCMy9Jf5

Yes! Lovely 2 weeks in the Swiss mountains with an incredibly bright and inspiring group of students 🫰🌄🧑‍💻

Will remember lots of late night sessions preparing the next day all while having great fun w/ the inimitable @esterner.bsky.social!

Joy in teaching - restored 💫

New at the university: Prof. Weber! Osnabrück University welcomes Prof. Dr. Lilian Weber! Since August 15, she has held the professorship "Cognitive Modeling" at the School of Human Sciences. A warm welcome!

In other news, I am now a ✨ COXI ✨ (cognitive scientist in Osnabrück, Germany)

www.uni-osnabrueck.de/en/campus-li...

I'll be looking for PhD students & postdocs later this year, so watch this space if combining cognitive modelling, EEG & tFUS to study flexible cognition sounds exciting to you 🚀

Job alert 🚨 Fully funded PhD position available in our Maastricht lab! Are you interested in predictive processing, individual differences, and computational modelling of behavioural and neural data? Please apply! #NeuroJobs vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastric...

a penguin is sticking his head out of a hole next to a job application ALT: a penguin is sticking his head out of a hole next to a job application

📢 We are hiring! 📢
For our @wellcometrust.bsky.social grant on information gathering biases in #OCD and #Schizophrenia, we are looking for a Postdoc in Computational Modelling, supervised by Peter Dayan and myself.
Interested? See all the details in the job advert here: devcompsy.org/wp-content/u...

Yes, the brain is a computer… No, it’s not a metaphor

I stopped reading this one at the snowflake-as-computer line though 🥶

medium.com/the-spike/ye...

binds.cs.umass.edu

On the Computational Power of Neural Nets (1995)

Why your brain is not a computer The long read: For decades it has been the dominant metaphor in neuroscience. But could this idea have been leading us astray all along?

But obviously our brains are not "Von Neumann architectures" - digital human-made programmable devices. Those serve only as a weak metaphor for the brain

www.theguardian.com/science/2020...