Zahra

My reviewing style has changed over time. Rather than litigate every little thing, and pushing my own ideas, I focus only on 2 things:
(1) Are the claims interesting/important?
(2) Does the evidence support the claims?

Most of my reviews these days are short and focused.

🔈 Our edited volume "Decision Making: Fundamentals and Applications", co-edited with @ulrichettinger.bsky.social and Bert Heinrichs, is out.

url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/9P5mCROAEn...

#DecisionScience #DecisionMaking #Psychology #Psychiatry #Neuroscience #Philosophy

Want to make publication-ready figures come straight from Python without having to do any manual editing? Are you fed up with axes labels being unreadable during your presentations? Follow this short tutorial including code examples! 👇🧵

A line attractor maintains aggressiveness during feeding in “hangry” mice Aggression evolved to protect resources such as food from competitors, but animals must balance fighting and feeding so that they facilitate rather than hinder re-establishment of energy homeostasis. ...

The neuroscience of hanger: "When confronted with food and an intruder, hangry mice alternated between feeding and fighting" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#NeuroJobs

Discovering state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms @Nature.com

6th International Mobile Brain/Body Imaging (MoBI) Conference
📅 August 25–28, 2026

🚀 Registration & Abstract Submission Now Open!

🔗 Register now:
👉 lnkd.in/dYgS5ndk

🧠 Submit your contribution:
👉 lnkd.in/dR6y5y4b

In case you don't know already, the journal Open Mind has a Bluesky account that automatically posts new papers:
@openmindjournal.bsky.social

The journal is diamond open access (free to read, free to publish) thanks to the support of MIT Press, Harvard Library, & MIT Library.

🎓PhD application season is back!

We’re hiring ONLY through the ELLIS @ellis.eu and the MCML
@munichcenterml.bsky.social

📌Please denote Prof. Zeynep Akata @zeynepakata.bsky.social as your preferred supervisor!
👉 Link to ELLIS (ellis.eu/news/ellis-p...) and MCML (mcml.ai/opportunitie...)

🎓✨ The 2025 CaCTüS interns wrapped up their research at the CaCTüS Symposium, sharing inspiring work!
Read more 👉https://kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/cactues25
📅 Get ready: the next round of international CaCTüS internship applications is about to open on Oct 16.
#Research #Internship #CACTÜS

Fully-funded 4-year #PhD in Cultural Evolution! Join my @erc.europa.eu project exploring how compression & compositionality drive cultural innovation: hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur...
Apply by Nov 12!
Maybe of interest to folks from #COSMOS2025 or @eslr.bsky.social? Please feel free to share! 🙏

Really interesting work by Bakhurin and colleagues challenging the reward prediction error hypothesis of dopamine:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
I love this figure which both echoes and undermines the famous figure from Schultz et al. (1997).

Brain-computer interface for a patient with quadriplegia A team at the Technical University of Munich’s TUM University Hospital has implanted a brain-computer interface in a patient paralyzed from the neck down.

A big push for #BCI and #neurotechnology in Europe! We implanted our second microelectrode array #BCI @tum.de. Huge thanks to our pioneer and to fantastic colleagues in #Neurosurgery and #Robotics #Machine #Intelligence 🧠🦾🧪 #neuroskyence @neuroengineering.bsky.social
www.tum.de/en/news-and-...

#NeuroJobs

For everyone who is not "alive by love" in this circle,
recite the prayer of the dead for his death, on my authority.

But if Hafez seeks from you a favour,
assign him to the heart-cherishing lips of the beloved.

There is a great difference between you the lover and the beloved:
when the beloved shows feigned disdain, you make supplication.

The first advice of the pîr of the assembly is this:
‘avoid the company of wrong friends!’

The rebeck and the harp are saying in a loud voice:
‘listen with understanding to the message of the people of the mystery!’

By the beloved's soul, grief will not pull away your veil,
if you rely on the favours of the Caretaker.

Dear companions, open the knot of the tress of the beloved;
it is a pleasant night; lengthen it by this means!

It is an intimate retreat, this gathering of friends;
recite the magic charms and close the door!

Take this poem as an example. In print, I have only its German translation at hand, as in the video, but here's the English translation:

It's an absolute privilege to be able to read his poems, these gems, in their original language, #Farsi, and to understand all the literal, stylistic, romantic and spiritual devices he has used in his phrasings, which are often lost in translation or need quite a lot of context and explanation.

Hafez - Wikipedia

Today is the day we Persians honor our highly respected poet, Hafez Shirazi.

a thread 🧵

#Hafez #Shiraz #Farsi #Iran #poem
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafez

Curious about creating a reproducible workflow for your research? 🔍 We provide several self-paced tutorials about tools that make your work more efficient, reproducible, and collaborative.
Self-Paced Tutorial of the Day: Introduction to R 📊 lmu-osc.github.io/introduction...

I don't know that it works perfectly, but I have to say that the Asta search tool from @ai2.bsky.social is exactly what I want from an AI-powered research search tool for scientists: Describe a style of experiment or work and see if there are papers that have done that.
asta.allen.ai/chat

🕒 Time’s almost up to apply for the CogSci Society | Gorilla Grant 2025!

If you’re running studies online, this is your chance to get a full Gorilla subscription, $300 for recruitment, and expert support.

Deadline is October 16 🗓️

Apply today!👇

#NeuroJobs

YouTube video by Dwarkesh Patel Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end

The brain isn’t tabula rasa. Evolution has encoded strong inductive priors in our neural architectures and plasticity rules, providing structured initialization that enables efficient reinforcement learning and optimization.

#neuroAI #compneuro m.youtube.com/watch?v=21EY...

Congratulations Charley! 🎉

Check out our lab's blog post on my recently published study on how social judgment makes you struggle to learn active responses!

#brain #neuroscience #cogsci #neuroskyence #compneurosky #science #research #cognition

#NeuroJobs

The Max Planck School of Cognition is still accepting PhD applications. Join an interdisciplinary community where AI meets neuroscience, psychology meets philosophy, and curiosity drives discovery.
📅 Apply today: cognition.maxplanckschools.org/en

#PhD #Cognition #Research