Sarah Jessen

Top left: Experimental paradigm. The authors analyzed EEG data recorded from 49 sleeping human newborns while being exposed to monophonic piano melodies composed by J. S. Bach (real condition) and control stimuli (shuffled condition). Top right: Surprise and entropy. Surprise and entropy associated with each note’s timing (green, St and Et, respectively) and pitch (yellow, Sp and Ep, respectively) were estimated using an unsupervised statistical learning model trained on all stimuli. Dot plots display mean surprise and entropy associated with real and shuffled music, averaged across melodies (left panel), and separately for each melody (right panel). Bottom: Analytical approach. Multivariate Temporal Response Function (mTRF) models were fit to describe the forward relationship between multiple stimulus features and the EEG signal. The full TRF model (leftmost panel) included acoustic low-level features (spectral flux, acoustic onset, IOI, and IPI) and high-level features (surprise and entropy of pitch and timing).

Does our very human ability to anticipate #musical structure exist at birth? @robertabianco.bsky.social @giacomonovembre.bsky.social &co show that #newborns encode #rhythmic (but not melodic) expectations based on statistical regularities in real #music @plosbiology.org plos.io/4kqKVWg

🎓 Die Fachgruppe Entwicklungspsychologie (DGPs) vergibt derzeit bis zu 4 MiniGrants à 1.500 € zur Förderung von Vernetzung und Laborbesuchen in frühen Karrierephasen. Die Grants ermöglichen Einblicke in neue Arbeitsgruppen, Methoden und Forschungsprozesse durch Aufenthalte.

📢 Applications are open for the 2026 #JacobsCIFARFellowship!

A new partnership between the Jacobs Foundation and CIFAR supports early- & mid-career researchers advancing how children learn & develop worldwide.

🗓️ Apply by 2 February 2026 → cifarportal.smapply.io/prog/jacobs_...

We are advertising **11 new PhD positions** in the second cohort of our RTG on Curiosity (details on all 11 positions here: www.uni-goettingen.de/de/open+posi...). One of these positions is in my group looking at the role of curiosity in early word learning (www.uni-goettingen.de/en/644546.ht...)

Just published my "Programming for Psychologists" course! 👩‍💻 github.com/Naubody/prog...

Designed for Psychology & Cognitive Neuroscience Master's students starting their programming journey at @vuamsterdam.bsky.social.

Feel free to share! Feedback welcome!

Mitglieder der neuen Fachgruppenleitung von links nach rechts: Markus Werkle-Bergner, Claudia Friedrich, Özlem Sensoy, Sarah Jessen, und Trinh Nguyen

Neue Fachgruppenleitung der EPSY gewählt!

#DGPs #EPSY #EPSY_news #Entwicklungspsychologie #Fachgruppe

It's FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS FALL 🍁🎃🍂

Check out our free, upcoming talks and register here: fitng.org/fitng-togeth...

schematic of fetal OPM-MEG

📈🧠 We're looking for brains! 🧠📈
Postdoc + PhD positions are available to help pioneer fetal MEG with optically pumped magnetometers, measuring prenatal responses to sound and light to understand how we start making sense of the world even before we're born. 🐣

Please get in touch to hear more!

Looking for a Master internship and interested in timing the interplay between timing and hearing?
🔽
brainthemind.com/openings/

🥁 New preprint 👇 got the whole @kinderstudien.bsky.social lab working together 🤗 plus some friends, guests & alumni. Our developmental take on interpersonal neural synchrony - from basic entrainment to communicative rhythms to shared representations 🧠🧠

We’ll have talks by @freekvanede.bsky.social‬, Marlene Meyer, @giacomonovembre.bsky.social, Julius Welzel, Martin Bleichner, and Melanie Klapprott, and lots of time for posters and discussions. More details, submission of abstract, and registration here: www.imove2025.org

Are you interested in what to do with all that movement data you often get in your neuroscience measures? Is it just noise, or how can we make use of it? This December, we are organizing a workshop in Lübeck to discuss precisely these questions. (1/2)

We’ll have talks by @freekvanede.bsky.social‬, Marlene Meyer, ‪@giacomonovembre.bsky.social‬, Julius Welzel, Martin Bleichner, and Melanie Klapprott, and lots of time for posters and discussions. More details, submission of abstract, and registration here: www.imove2025.org

Social odor as a source of learning in human infants Maternal odor has recently emerged as an important but ill-understood factor in sociocognitive learning in early human development. We propose that so…

Out now in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! Check out our new article discussing how social odor can impact other sociocognitive processes in infancy.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Respiratory and cardiac interoceptive sensitivity in the first two years of life Infants are sensitive to their own respiration and heartbeat already in the first two years of life.

Do babies sense their own body rhythms? Our new paper on 🫀 & 🫁 interoception in 👶 is now out in @elife.bsky.social: Respiratory and cardiac interoceptive sensitivity in the first two years of life doi.org/10.7554/eLif... @kinderstudien.bsky.social @univie.ac.at led by @markustuente.bsky.social

Development of Auditory and Spontaneous Movement Responses to Music over the First Year of Life Humans across cultures not only share the ability to recognise music but also respond to it through movement. While the sensory encoding of music is well-studied, when and how infants naturally start ...

Check out our new preprint on how infants respond to music over the first year of life! 👶🧠💃🎶
While neural responses are pretty much ready to go in the youngest, moving to music takes a bit longer, becoming more complex and potentially more dance-like by 12 months. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We're looking for a PhD student interested in developing brains and developing new methods to study them! Anna Kowalczyk and myself have a fully funded PhD position to advance OPM-MEG methods for infant and neonatal brain imaging. 👉 Please repost to help us spread the word 🙏 More info & links 👇

@sarahjessen.bsky.social of the Babylab @uniluebeck.bsky.social took Martin Orf and me from the @jonasobleser.bsky.social lab along an intriguing journey into the neural fate and consequences of a mother‘s voice in her infant’s brain. Under review now. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A bird's-eye view of a former Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp showing a wide dirt pathway flanked by parallel rows of barbed-wire fences. Groups of visitors walk along the path, surrounded by the remnants of brick structures and barracks, now reduced to foundations. Green grass contrasts with the somber history of the site, as the path leads toward a guard tower in the distance.

Auschwitz was at the end of a long process. It did not start from gas chambers.

This hatred was gradually developed by humans. From ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder.

Auschwitz took time.

Stefanie Höhl holding her book titled Das größte kleine Wunder.

First time holding my book ✨ I had so much fun writing about the absolute miracle that is the first years of human development. For parents, practitioners and anybody interested in the latest research on early social, cognitive and emotional development 👶 Babies are the best 🫶

LEMMI: it’s happening. German
federal agency Wissenschaftsrat
recommends for funding the future „Lübeck Environment for Minds and Machine in Interaction“ research building. Hooray! @uniluebeck.bsky.social Land Schleswig-Holstein. t.co/xe5gFbzo5Q

Advertising 11 PhD positions in the RTG "Form-meaning mismatches". Project 3 - associated with my group - examines how word-form and word-meaning mismatches influence early word learning, expanding on this publication (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...).

Come join our lab (cns-luebeck.com) and the newly established research consortium on sexdiversity. If you are interested in the neuroendocrine basis of affective behavior and in working in a strongly interdisciplinary research group, apply now! Details here: www.cns-luebeck.com/wp-content/u...

Join our ERC project "INTERACT - The interplay of neural networks enabling social interaction" as PhD student or PostDoc. DM me with questions.
- Thanks for sharing -
@dgps.bsky.social @ohbmtrainees.bsky.social @s4sn.bsky.social @sansmeeting.bsky.social @tudresden.bsky.social
tud.link/uim3

The focus will be on postnatal environments, but there might be one or the other project also including prenatal aspects.

Thanks for all the sudden attention. Just a quick note that the deadline for these particular five grants has already passed, BUT there will be more coming up from the same COST action on a very similar topics next year! So keep your eyes open, we’ll definitively advertise here.

How do kids and adult figure out who is the boss? Looks like kids base their judgements on physical parameters, while adults rather consider behavior. For more details check out our new preprint with @sarahtune.bsky.social and our super talented students Sarah, Sara and Anna. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft richtet an der Uni Lübeck einen Sonderforschungsbereich ein, der sich mit der Erforschung der Vielfalt des biologischen Geschlechts beschäftigen wird! 🎉Das Verbundprojekt wird mit knapp zwölf Millionen Euro gefördert. #Forschung www.uni-luebeck.de/aktuelles/na...

generic view of a busy street in a city.

Five €4000 grants available to support PhDs and postdocs to conduct international lab visits to study how environments influence early development - including philosophy, methods/tools, policy impacts (www.cost.eu/actions/CA22...). More details here: t.co/iDmbI7pBEw

PhD Admissions & Requiremens, Behavior, Cognition, & Neuroscience Admissions and degree requirements for the PhD in Behavior, Cognition, and Neuroscience at American University in Washington, DC.

Interested in how babies understand the visual/social world? 🧠👶🤖 I'm anticipating accepting a new PhD student! 🚨 Grow your #DevPsyc, #eeg, #fNIRS, & #compneuro skills, contribute to NSF/NARSAD funded research in lovely DC 🌸
Deadline 12/1: www.american.edu/cas/neurosci... (GRE op.)
Team: bayetlab.com