Anna-Lena Eckert

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...

Frontiers | The Brain-Computer Metaphor Debate Is Useless: A Matter of Semantics It is commonly assumed that usage of the word "computer" in the brain sciences reflects a metaphor. However, there is no single definition of the word "compu...

I actually learned a lot myself when preparing for this talk.

Some of my main sources...

Our brains might be computers in the sense of "devices capable of solving any computable function *in theory*" (Turing machines)

www.frontiersin.org/journals/com...

Standing in front of my conclusion slide that has a quote from Richards & Lillicrap 2022: "brains are either literally computers or not very much like computers at all"

10 years after I came as a participant in 2015, tonight I had the pleasure of giving an evening lecture at the Studienstiftung summer academy in the Swiss mountains ⛰️

My talk on brains-as-computers fell on open ears and there were 45 min of super exciting questions. What a joy!

Would love to be added and also recommend @esterner.bsky.social and @franziskaknolle.bsky.social 😊🚀 thanks!

Never ask postdocs what they'll be doing next year, that's considered terribly offensive in their culture.

Are you at #CPconf2025 and interested in inference and generalization?

@luiantaverra.bsky.social will present on aversive learning and avoidance, and how these are impacted by anxiety P1.67

I will present a poster on the role of internalizing psychopathology in contextual inference P1.72

“The goal of academic training is not to solve problems as efficiently and quickly as possible, but to develop skills for identifying and dealing with novel problems, which have never been solved before.”

nothing makes sense in computational modelling, except in the light of these two all-time classic maxims:

1. all models are wrong, some are useful - George Box

2. everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler - Albert Einstein

We have an open PhD position in an exciting @dfg.de - @ageinves.bsky.social project to further develop continuous psychophysics in collaboration with Joan-Lopez Moliner.

I was glad to see your comment appearing first! Fully agree. It's not as easy as "women, just learn to say no" - where a no can have pretty negative outcomes as well 🤷 This stuff runs so much deeper

Being Too Helpful At Work Can Hurt Your Career—Here’s How To Say No Women are more likely to take on behind-the-scenes duties at work—extra tasks like onboarding or event planning—and it's hurting their careers. Here's how to say no.

In a study of professors, women got 378 new work requests over 4 weeks vs 118 for men. Women spent more time on service, advising & teaching; men on research. Orgs should track who is taking extra duties & ensure they are rewarded and distributed fairly. www.forbes.com/sites/kimels...

Here's a bit of spice. Brain research clearly needs to tackle more complexity (than, say, Step 1: simple linear causal chains). But that leaves an ~infinite set of alternatives. Here, @pessoabrain.bsky.social advocates not for just a step 2, but a 3. /1

arxiv.org/abs/2411.03621

PhD position — Rademaker lab

Curious about the visual human brain, a vibrant and collaborative lab, and pursuing a PhD in the heart of Europe? My lab is recruiting for a 3-year PhD position. More details: www.rademakerlab.com/job-add

Yay!!! 🌟 Congratulations! This looks super exciting