Neda Shahidi

Reflecting on the past months, I feel truly grateful for the chance to spend 4 months in Göttingen, Germany, in yet another Erasmus program as an intern at the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Deutsches…... Reflecting on the past months, I feel truly grateful for the chance to spend 4 months in Göttingen, Germany, in yet another Erasmus program as an intern at the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Deutsches ...

Our summer Erasmus student, Evangelos, wrote this about his summer internship experience with us. I am very happy that you achieved both a professional and a personal milestone, Evan! www.linkedin.com/posts/evange...

That’s how you know he is a baby of academics: Ewan has a pediatrician visit next week and just started to do new developmental skills! Deadline driven like the rest of us 😁

I have an open position for an M.Sc. thesis, with the potential to continue into a paid PhD. If you know machine learning and are interested in naturalistic decision making in primates, email me a CV: www.uni-goettingen.de/de/embodied+...

A paper from my first postdoc is now out in PLOS Computational Biology. There, I have compared three probabilistic models of response suppression: subtraction, division, and negative feedback, for salamander, mouse, and marmoset retinal ganglion cells. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

From April: We had a poster at the primate neurobiology meeting where Sara presented a side-by-side comparison of vigilance in macaques in the lab and the field. It's interesting to see how naturalistic our naturalistic experiments are! This is a shared project with Julia Ostner's group at the DPZ.

I have been back at work this week (although I never really left work!) after my son Ewan was born last December. He is a sweet and smiley little boy. I couldn't have asked for better.

Foraging conference - Programme [ 11 to 13, December 2024 ]

This week, René will present a poster of one of our floor foraging projects at a foraging conference in Lyon, France. Check out the program here: sites.google.com/view/foragin...

From last week: René successfully finished his M.Sc. thesis. Together with Fabian Sinz and me, René developed a model to reconstruct the spiking activity of a population of neurons and tested it on neurons in the frontoparietal reach network (Data: courtesy of Alex Gail). Way to go, René!

From October 1st: Welcome Numa Koudsie to ECG as a new research assistant. Numa will work on a neural network model to predict foraging success in a group of lemurs. This is a collaboration with Claudia Fichtel at the Behavioral Ecology Dept. (DPZ) and Fabian Sinz at the Data Science Dept. (UGOE)

check out the article that Ayuno Nakahashi and I wrote for DPZ aktuell (page 25) about our experience at the Pint of Science, Göttingen. Too bad I missed Ayuno's cool experiment. www.dpz.eu/fileadmin/co...

from Sept 3rd: Thank you Tatyana Sharpee for visiting us in Goe on a short notice and giving a talk on using hyperbolic geometry to understand biological systems. We couldn't arrange online broadcasting of Tatyana's talk, but checkout this relevant publication: meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR2...

Wishing Hannah Lüschen, a member of ECG, the best for her next career step in one of the neuroscience M.Sc. programs that she has been accepted for. 🥳 Stay awesome Hannah! 🤩 Never change!

Many thanks to my colleague at the University of Konstanz and MPI, specially Ahmed El Hadi, for the great scientific exchange (still going on). Details about my yesterday's talk at www.exc.uni-konstanz.de/collective-b... (and I believe a recording will be available on youtube later)

We discussed Fan et al., Neuron, 2024 in ECG jclub, led by Hannah: gazes with social context (eyes or face of another monkey) are causally controlled by orbitofrontal cortex in macaques. The gaze following seems to be controlled by dmPFC. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38187638/

Visual perceptual learning modulates microsaccade rate and directionality - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Visual perceptual learning modulates microsaccade rate and directionality

From March 2024: we discussed Hung et al in ECG jclub, led by Sara: The study fund a decrease in the number of microsaccades, linked to adaptation and learning in the visual system www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Think Fast!: Vervet Monkeys Assess the Risk of Being Displaced by a Dominant Competitor When Making Foraging Decisions Foraging animals need to quickly assess the costs and benefits of different foraging decisions, including resource quantity, quality, preference, ease of access, dispersion, distance, and predation ri...

From April, 2024: We discussed Arseneau-Robar et. al. in ECG j club, led by Kacper: monkeys adapt their foraging based on experience and social context. Monkeys performed a foraging task with preferred and less less preferred food, competing with another monkey www.frontiersin.org/articles/10....

Mapping model units to visual neurons reveals population code for social behaviour - Nature A deep neural network with ‘knockout training’ is used to model sensorimotor transformations and neural perturbations of male Drosophila melanogaster during visually guided social behaviour and p...

We discussed Cowley et al, in ECG journal club, led by Sara. They turned off neurons in Lobula columnar, one by one, then, trained ANNs to map artificial and real LC neurons, then predicted ANN's response to a wide range of visual inputs to infer tuning of each neuron www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Goettingen Explore Pint of Science Germany events in Goettingen

Next week it is again "Pint of Science" Week, and we will be represented by Ayuno Nakahashi (@ayuno-n.bsky.social) and Neda Shahidi (@nedash.bsky.social). Looking forward to the talks at the Duke Pub and a cold brew 🍻. Cheers!

pintofscience.de/events/goett...

We will offer a workshop on observational learning at Intl. Conf. in Development and Learning. Here are the details: www.uni-goettingen.de/de/687263.html Looking forward to be back in Austin, my second hometown

Read the interview of DPZ Aktuell with me about science, life, cats, and everything else here: www.dpz.eu/fileadmin/co...

hbr.org/2018/03/crea... In a growth culture, people build their capacity to see through blind spots; acknowledge insecurities and shortcomings rather than unconsciously acting them out …How people feel — and make other people feel — becomes as important as how much they know.

My new paper in Nature Neuroscience, based on a free foraging experiment I conducted during my PhD. Macaques self-pace actions for a better chance of reward, and we decoded their subjective belief of reward, leading to actions, from dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Visuo-frontal interactions during social learning in freely moving macaques - Nature Behavioural tracking and wireless neural and eye-tracking recordings show that freely moving macaques learn to cooprate using visually guided signals along the visual-frontal cortical network.

Checkout my first, first-author paper, published today! <3
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

x.com/Melissa_Fran...

Artificial intelligence in primate research, a talk by my colleague Richard (in German) : www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rUh...

The days are going to get longer in the north hemisphere for the next six months. Happy Yalda, the sun’s birthday 🌞

Sexism in academia is bad for science and a waste of public funding - Nature Reviews Materials Higher education and research institutions are critical to the well-being and success of societies, meaning their financial support is strongly in the public interest. At the same time, value-for-mone...

'The loss, misuse, obstruction and sabotage of female talent in academia represents a stunning drain on the public purse.' #womeninstem www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Congratulations to ECG members and their collaborators at the cognitive Neuroscience lab for winning the marshmallow problem contest at xmass party! Well done folks ;)

From October 2023: former intern Meera Ramadas is joining Daniela Vallentin's group at the MPl for Biological Intelligence, Munich on a collaborative comp. neuro. PhD with Jan Clemens in European Neuroscience Institute, Goettingen. She is part of the IMPRS for Biological Intelligence PhD program.

From Nov. 2023: M.Sc. student Kacper Ksiezak presented at Intl. Conf. on Complex Networks. @sfb1528.bsky.social with Sinz lab we show that a gated recurr neur net predicts a monkey's foraging choices by memorizing his posture. Even better when memorizing posture of human the monkey coordinated with

From October 2023: former research assistant Yuliya Badayeva joined Arnaud Krebs's group at European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, to start her PhD in molecular genomics.