Bianca Schuster

Contact person: For further inquiries please contact Katalin Szigeti, PhD, the Training Unit Coordinator of the CoE (margit.katalin.szigeti@univie.ac.at).

Are you passionate about neuroimaging methods and would like to work with us? 🚨

4-year PhD position on methods development in the new Cluster of Neuronal Circuits in Health and Disease (coe.univie.ac.at) and the role of GABA in the amygdala and other brain areas 🧠

Details: shorturl.at/EcI2W

Pls 🔁

New paper alert!

Information transfer within and between autistic and non-autistic people is out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com

nature.com/articles/s41...

THREAD! 🧵⬇️

Very happy to report that this study is now published in Molecular Autism: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🚨 Come work with us!

3-year fully funded PhD position in Social and Cognitive Neuroscience @univie.ac.at @clauslamm.bsky.social to join our project investigating prosocial behavior under uncertainty.

More info: shorturl.at/1fnb2

Please share widely 🔁

🌍 We are launching a new #ManyLabs!!! Join the Heat & Cognition project! We're studying how extreme heat affects human thinking, social behavior & well-being — globally.
Contribute & co-author:
🔗 Info: heatandmind.wordpress.com
📋 Sign up: www.soscisurvey.de/HeatandCogni...
#EnvironmentalPsychology

Will portals for talk/poster abstract submission close the morning or end of the 14th?

In our new review paper @clauslamm.bsky.social
and I discuss the latest evidence on how #dopamine
shapes trust learning 🧠 🤝 - see below for a 🧵!

I'm recruiting a 23-month postdoc! If you're interesting in #ComputationalPsychiatry or #EatingDisorders research please apply and/or get in touch - very happy to have informal chats with potential applicants, and put you in touch with existing members of my lab. jobs.york.ac.uk/vacancy/rese...

This work is of course the result of the joint efforts of a large group of fantastic researchers (many of whom are not on bluesky): Yuko Okamoto, Toru Takahashi, Yuto Kurihara, ‪@connortkeating.bsky.social‬, Jen Cook, Hirotaka Kosaka, Masakazu Ide, Hiroaki Naruse, Carmen Kraaijkamp, and Rieko Osu 🎉🙏

We discuss why our results suggest a lack of cultural sensitivity in commonly used mentalising tasks rather than superior mentalising abilities in Japanese autistic individuals.

Intriguingly, we did not observe the same pattern in Japanese participants, where there were no mentalising differences between autistic and non-autistic observers.

We identify movement similarity as one of the dimensions along which mismatches between neurotypes may occur, and show how increased within-group variability in movement indices may be responsible for the lack of own-group mentalising advantage in the autistic group.

In showing that – at least for non-autistic participants – cross-neurotype mentalising results in lower accuracy, our findings in the UK sample replicate a prior study (Edey et al., 2016) and add partial support for mismatch accounts such as the ‘double empathy theory’.

In the UK sample, both autistic and non-autistic participants struggled more when interpreting the animations generated by the respective other group. While non-autistic participants were better at interpreting animations created by their own group, this was not the case for autistic participants.

We asked British and Japanese autistic and non-autistic adults to depict mentalistic interactions by moving two triangles around a touch-screen device, before they had to view interpret animations created by the other participants.

Social interactions cannot be assessed without (1) acknowledging the two-way process involved and (2) the cultural context the interactions are embedded in. We present new evidence for this, using stimuli like the one below, in our latest preprint: osf.io/xg7y4 🤝