Nadine Herzog

Such a cool and rigorous paper by @studenova.bsky.social !
bsky.app/profile/stud...

How dynamics arise from the structure is my biggest interest. In this study, we started with a small step and asked how structure constrains dynamics. Spoiler: would that it were so simple… (1/6)

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky academic.oup.com/icb/article-...

Woop woop 🎉 Excited to share that our paper has been accepted in Imaging Neuroscience!

Can ventral striatal reward signals — originating from deep within the brain — be reconstructed from scalp EEG?

We tried to answer this question using deep learning.

More soon 👀 Stay tuned.

What does a scientist look like? Children are drawing women more than ever before Study is based on 20,860 sketches drawn by children over 5 decades

On #InternationalDayOfWomenAndGirlsInScience, this article hit me: more children are drawing scientists as women than ever before. Yay! 🎉
🤔 But still only ~30%.
Progress, yes.
Equality, not yet.
www.science.org/content/arti...

@cbsopenscience.bsky.social great opportunity to connect over open science in Leipzig coming up!

If oscillations are modulated in amplitude from trial to trial, and those oscillations have a non-zero mean, they "create" an evoked response. It is a baseline-shift mechanism for ERP/ERF generation. Here is a simulated example of how alpha oscillations may generate readiness potential.
#brainmovies

I have been trying to simulate event-related alpha amplitude decrease with the Jansen-Rit model. Turns out adding external inhibitory input abolishes alpha. Pretty obvious. But how does it agree with more alpha = more inhibition?
#brainmovies

Heute noch Thema Vereinbarkeit (Familie & Beruf). Das ist mir auch deshalb wichtig, weil ich selbst als Doktorandin so gut wie keine Professorinnen mit Kind(ern) als Vorbild hatte, mir das aber gewünscht hätte. Meine Karriere sieht auf dem Papier jetzt wie ein "Vorzeigemodell" für Vereinbarkeit aus.

main goal for this year: find a new job! 🙂

looking for a role with fun & complex technical challenges & within a great community. my main expertise is in signal processing/EEG/MEG, but topic-wise I am quite flexible.

science/industry both great! starting mid-year. nschawor.github.io/cv

Richard McElreath: It must not be overlooked that junior researchers DO NOT TRUST US. We, the directors, are a big part of the problem. We made this system, we remake it every year, and we benefit from it. What can we do to credibly signal our commitment to reform a corrupt research culture? My conversations with junior scientists in the society has taught me that directors are too often either indifferent or hostile to science reform. We cannot hope to convince our prize winning colleagues. Their egos are immune. But we can replace retirements with researchers who care more about integrity than their own prestige. This is important both for earning the trust of the junior researchers who really do the research in the MPG and for attracting excellent future directors and starting to earn the trust of the public. So I suggest two strong signals to our junior researchers (and the public): (1) we will reform recruitment and promotion at all levels to eliminate proxies like citation counts and journal brands in favor of reliability and sustainability; (2) we will make open science skills a core part of scientific training, through the graduate schools at a minimum, as conditions for the central funding. The most ambitious thing we could do, as hinted at in item 5 above, is to meaningfully invest in metascientific research. As the largest basic research organization in the world, the MPG is uniquely suited to studying research and its products from a broad perspective that includes the humanities, the sciences, and policy. Governments are already involved in science reform. Someone should study it in an organized and sustained way.

The Max Planck Society has begun an exploratory round table for open science. We are drafting some recommendations to leadership. Still a long way to go! But here are my notes on the most recent draft, just so you all know how I am trying to steer things.

It’s not too late to apply for the PhD position in my lab! Please send your documents (cover letter, CV, transcripts, names of references) through the official application platform by Nov 25!

Please share! - 🚨⚠️ PhD position alert ⚠️🚨 - Please share!

Come work with @ldeserno.bsky.social and yours truly on an exciting DFG-funded project on the neurocognitive mechanisms of (noise in) learning and decision-making in development and ADHD!

Photograph of a half-eaten jam doughnut. Image by Alexander Fox | PlaNet Fox from Pixabay.

Is overeating driven by hedonism? @danasmall.bsky.social &co argue that the pleasure of eating food is not a driver of the #obesity epidemic, but rather the regular consumption of an unhealthy diet blunts sensitivity to interoceptive signals that drive food reward #neurosky 🧪
plos.io/4nTlHQc

Das Sichtbarkeitsparadox: Warum Wissenschaftlerinnen es nicht richtig… Als exzellent gelten setzt voraus, sichtbar zu sein. Wissenschaftlerinnen werden jedoch für Sichtbarkeit abgestraft. Egal was sie tun: Sie können es nur falsch machen!

Wer in der Wissenschaft als exzellent gelten will, muss sichtbar sein. Nur: Frauen werden für Sichtbarkeit abgestraft. Sie können es schlicht nicht richtig machen! Kein Wunder, dass Gleichstellung im dt. Wissenschaftssystem schleppend vorangeht. Das #Sichtbarkeitsparadox: heute in #ArbeitInDerWiss!

View from your office onto Giessen and surrounding villages.

Please repost! I am looking for a PhD candidate in the area of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience to start in early 2026.

The position is funded as part of the Excellence Cluster "The Adaptive Mind" at @jlugiessen.bsky.social.

Please apply here until Nov 25:
www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...

Dopamine dynamics during stimulus-reward learning in mice can be explained by performance rather than learning - Nature Communications VTA dopamine activity control movement-related performance, not reward prediction errors. Here, authors show that behavioral changes during Pavlovian learning explain DA activity regardless of reward ...

Big shake-up for dopamine theory?
This new @NatureComms paper argues that VTA dopamine isn’t signaling reward prediction error but instead modulates force and performance.
If true, it decouples learning from motivation and puts pressure on decades of RPE-based models.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Fresh from the press 🍃
In this article, we put forward a framework for understanding goal-directed and habitual control. We propose how interactive loops in the brain & shortcuts between them may shape our behavior – and that of Transformers. Looking forward to your thoughts💡
doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

Functional connectivity is dominated by aperiodic, rather than oscillatory, coupling Functional connectivity (FC) has attracted significant interest in the identification of specific circuits underlying brain (dys-)function. Classical analyses to estimate FC ( i.e ., filtering electro...

Functional connectivity (FC) is driven by 1/f. The approach: compute FC as usual, compute FC only with ROI where oscillations are 'present', then compare. Alpha lives, but not other bands. Idk, seems overstated. If beta comes in bursts: no peak, but could be FC
doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1041-25.2025

Data Scientist or Machine Learning / AI expert (m/f/d) Data Scientist or Machine Learning / AI expert (m/f/d) to join the AI and High-Performance Data Analytics division of MPCDF.

We are looking for “Data Scientist or ML/AI expert” who will work at the cutting edge of data science and neuromaging in a collaboration between @mpicbs.bsky.social and the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility (MPCDF).

Deadline: 10th Nov. 2025.

Apply here:

Published now (after long last & 10 citations). Although tVNS does not alter food reward ratings in healthy people, it acutely improved liking ratings in patients with MDD (also correlated with anhedonia). #neuroskyence 🩺

Work w/ @akuehnel.bsky.social
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Elucidating some common biases in randomized controlled trials using directed acyclic graphs Although the ideal randomized clinical trial is the gold standard for causal inference, real randomized trials often suffer from imperfections that may hamper causal effect estimation. Stating the estimand of interest can help reduce confusion about what is being estimated, but it is often difficult to determine what is and is not identifiable given a trial’s specific imperfections. We demonstrate how directed acyclic graphs can be used to elucidate the consequences of common imperfections, such as noncompliance, unblinding, and drop-out, for the identification of the intention-to-treat effect, the total treatment effect and the physiological treatment effect. We assert that the physiological treatment effect is not identifiable outside a trial with perfect compliance and no dropout, where blinding is perfectly maintained

Table 1 showing the Identifiability of target estimands depending on whether there is blinding, full compliance, and no drop-out

An example DAG from the paper. Fig. 4: A blinded trial with noncompliance. U are unobserved confounders, Z is treatment assignment, C is compliance, X is the realized treatment, S is the subject's physical and mental health status, Xself and Xcln are the treatment that the participant and the clinician believed the participant received, Y is the outcome.

Just finished reading this *excellent* article by Gabriel et al. which discusses which effects can be identified in randomized controlled trials. With DAGs!>

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Feeding gut microbes to nourish the brain: unravelling the diet–microbiota–gut–brain axis - Nature Metabolism This Review provides an overview of the interplay between host diet and the gut microbiota, and how this affects brain function.

#Throwback 🧪

REVIEW | Feeding gut microbes to nourish the brain: unravelling the diet–microbiota–gut–brain axis

@elizschneider.bsky.social‬
‪@jfcryan.bsky.social et al

🧠 Join Our Team! 🧠
2 PhD candidates and 1 Study Nurse positions ope as part of our new RCT within the LeiCeM Excellence Cluster.
- PhD (deadline:15/10): tinyurl.com/35e5tbhy
- PhD within the IMPRIS-CONI (deadline:02/11): tinyurl.com/y9yt4akf
- Study Nurse (deadline:15/10): tinyurl.com/4zztjmj9

Alina Studenova - myside-bias Have you ever argued with someone about a political issue and lost your temper because they just didn’t seem to hear your arguments? Why don’t they hear your arguments? Your arguments were perfectly s...

I read books on various topics. This time, I picked up a book that I thought would be about cognitive science, but turned out to be political. Still, the central argument applies to the lives of every scientist. “The Bias That Divides Us” by Keith E. Stanovich
www.alinastudenova.com/home/blog/bo...

Simulations are fun! Especially with the right tools😉.
@willenjoy.bsky.social and I (with support from Mina Jamshidi) made a toolbox for simulating EEG/MEG data
meegsim.readthedocs.io
I put together a quick simulation using it for this short clip. Took me 10 minutes (no, really!)
#brainmovies

In some way, it's trivial:

The #brain & the rest of the #body (e.g. the #heart) are coupled.

Yet, we spelled it out
w/ A. Villringer & V. Nikulin for current scientists (below)
w/ @martager.bsky.social @agatapatyczek.bsky.social @el-rei.bsky.social for future scientists bsky.app/profile/mart...

“The Big Three” properties of food that drive intake Much of the interest in studying human eating behavior stems from a desire to characterize properties of foods that affect consumption, with the goal …

What drives how much we eat? A new paper from Dr. Barbara Rolls et al. highlights “The Big Three” food properties that shape consumption:
1️⃣ Portion Size 2️⃣ Energy Density 3️⃣ Variety
See: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Hey Everyone! Before we kick off our review of the #SSIB special issue review we wanted to make sure that we connected with as many members as possible. Please help us by sharing this post and tagging anyone who is or should be a member of #SSIB!

@paulsteinfath.bsky.social check this out :)