Yana Fandakova

Leveling up fun: learning progress, expectations, and success influence enjoyment in video games Scientific Reports - Leveling up fun: learning progress, expectations, and success influence enjoyment in video games

What influences whether people have fun with a task?

Our paper “Leveling up fun: learning progress, expectations and success influence enjoyment in video games” with @thecharleywu.bsky.social and @ericschulz.bsky.social now in Scientific Reports!

rdcu.be/eI069

Paper summary below 1/4

Das ICAN der @unitrier.bsky.social präsentiert EEG, fNIRS und vieles mehr interessierten Kindern und Erwachsenen beim City Campus in Trier. Besucht uns gerne!

Studying memory narratives with natural language processing Cognitive neuroscience research has begun to use natural language processing (NLP) to examine memory narratives with the hopes of gaining a nuanced understanding of the mechanisms underlying differenc...

Quantifying memory recall is hard! Luckily, natural language processing (incl. #LLMs) offers new, automated, and scalable ways to do that!

Great new review by Fenerci & @signysheldon.bsky.social in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social!
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Thrilled to see our new paper highlighted in this week’s issue of #JNeurosci: we showed that metabolites linked to neuropil contraction are related to gray changes in the PFC across childhood and adolescence #devpsyc #neuroscience #neuroskyence

What a fantastic effort. Truly inspiring to see brilliant people dig deeply into these meta scientific issues.

This is the best time to be doing neuroimaging.

This was such a fun conversation about childhood, play, and agency across cultures. Thanks for having @sheinalew.bsky.social & I on the show!

Direct interactions between the human insula and hippocampus during memory encoding - Nature Neuroscience The hippocampus and insula communicate when processing emotional memories. Discrete sites in the human insular cortex showed changes that predicted later memory recall, while others responded to emoti...

Discrete sites in the human insular cortex showed changes of ac vity that predicted later memory recall, while others responded to emo onal content. Smula on of memoryrelated sites showed direct influence over the hippocampus

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Data reuse represents an opportunity to accelerate the pace of science, reduce costs and increase the value of our collective research investments. Data reuse represents an opportunity to accelerate the pace of science, reduce costs and increase the value of our collective research investments. New tools that make open data easier to use—and new…

If you're planning a study, search DANDI or OpenNeuro first to see if relevant data already exists. If you're teaching, incorporate open datasets into your curriculum, writes @bendichter.com

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/open-neurosc...

Watch the mathematics gender gap emerge. The school environment triggers a gender gap in mathematics. Line charts showing test results from all children in France who started school in 2018 reveal the trend. At the start of first year of school boys and girls similar on average with slightly more boys in highest and lowest percentiles. At the start of second year of school the gender gap becomes more exaggerated.

When do girls fall behind in maths? Gigantic study pinpoints the moment

https://go.nature.com/4l1nC4g

Screenshot of our preprint on PsyArXiv

I’m excited to share our new preprint – led by @hyejinjadelee.bsky.social & Derek Smith – where we applied precision approaches (i.e., extensive per-participant data collection) to behavioral measures of inhibitory control.
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Attempting my first bluesky 🧵 in the following....

Stability of general cognitive ability from infancy to adulthood: A combined twin and genomic investigation | PNAS Measures of general cognitive ability (GCA) are highly stable from adolescence onward, particularly at the level of genetic influences. In contrast...

We have an exciting new paper in PNAS on the stability of cognitive ability between infancy (7-9 months of age) and adulthood (~age 30). 1/4

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

OECS thematic collections.

If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind.

Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!

Interested in curiosity and metacognition in childhood and adolescence? Join us at Cardiff University (UK) for a Postdoc position in an international collaboration with @yanafandakova.bsky.social (Germany) and @pyoudeyer.bsky.social (France). Please repost! #DevPsych #PsychSciSky #neuroskyence

The Interplay of Memory and Decision Making – Developmental and Aging Processes: A Special Issue of European Psychologist: European Psychologist: Vol 29, No 4

How do changes in memory and experience across the lifespan shape our judgments and decisions? Together with @yeeleeshing.bsky.social @yanafandakova.bsky.social we have edited a special issue on the theme, check it out here: tinyurl.com/EPSpecial @dr-julia-nolte.bsky.social @loeckenhoff.bsky.social

This list looks really handy for teaching and research ⬇️

New paper out in @pnas.org with @laurendinicola.bsky.social, Noam Saadon-Grosman, Mark Eldaief and Randy Buckner!

We revisited the functional specialization of the human hippocampal long axis across two independent datasets, with some surprising results.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Toward a functional future for the cognitive neuroscience of human aging Mooraj et al. outline why task-based functional neuroimaging must move center-stage to better understand the neural bases of human cognitive aging. In turn, the authors sketch a framework intended to ...

Excited to share our function-oriented vision for the cognitive neuroscience of human aging, now out in Neuron: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

#neuroscience #aging

2024 synthesis of modifiable dementia risk factors across the lifespan. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Curiosity shapes spatial exploration and cognitive map formation in humans - Communications Psychology Across two studies using desktop VR, curiosity determined how much humans explored and how well the hand-drawn spatial maps they acquired corresponded to the rooms

"Curiosity shapes spatial exploration and cognitive map formation in humans." We are excited to share this novel paradigm and findings on curiosity-based exploration. This project was led tirelessly by @danlucen.bsky.social in collaboration with @cjhodgetts.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Aphantasia as imagery blindsight In a recent article in TiCS [1], Zeman provided a masterful and balanced review of aphantasia. However, in doing so, he might have been too generous to some accounts. Specifically, unlike Zeman, we consider the view that aphantasia involves nonconscious imagistic representations [2] to be clearly superior to other views. Here, we argue against these other views as they were described by Zeman. In addition, we address some additional arguments that have been raised to counter the idea that aphantasia involves nonconscious imagistic representations [3], which were not addressed by Zeman in his review.

Short letter in TiCS where we (@matthiasmichel.bsky.social, @hakwan.bsky.social & @neddo.bsky.social) explore the possibility that aphantasia is unconscious mental imagery. Given aphantasics’ high performance, we propose thinking about it as blindsight of the mind’s eye. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Great overview on brain atlases here by Revell et al! Which one is best though? Well, it's not that simple!

None of them reflects "ground truth", and parcellation scale, shape, and coverage impact structure-function predictions.

Good discussion in the paper!
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Please repost! We are hiring an assistant professor (W1) of Educational Psychology. We are looking forward to working with you!!

uni-tuebingen.de/en/faculties...

Adapting to time: Why nature may have evolved a diverse set of neurons Author summary The impressive successes of artificial neural networks (ANNs) in solving a range of challenging artificial intelligence tasks have led many researchers to explore the similarities betwe...

This paper on the usefulness of diversity of neuron types is pretty cool: journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Memory updating and the structure of event representations People form memories of specific events and use those memories to make predictions about similar new experiences. Living in a dynamic environment pres…

We use our memories to make predictions – but what happens when our memories are outdated and our predictions are wrong?

@cnwahlheim.bsky.social & @jzacks.bsky.social review evidence for how memories can be differentiated or integrated in light of new evidence

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Figure 1 from the paper, showing that kids understand that noise keeps people from hearing new knowledge.

Figure 2 from the paper, showing that kids gesture more when someone can't hear.

Ever seen a young child keep talking to you even when it's too noisy to hear? When do they learn that this doesn't work?

"Children’s understanding of how noise disrupts verbal communication" - new paper by Aaron Chuey, Rondeline Williams, me, and Hyo Gweon.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

PhD Position in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at Trier University The Learning Brain Lab located at the University of Trier (Prof. Dr. Yana Fandakova) is inviting applications for a PhD position (E 13 TV-L, 75 %) in the DFG-funded project „How curiosity enhances lea...

Interested in curiosity and metacognition across childhood and adolescence? Come work with us at the University of Trier - we have an open PhD position together with @mjgruber.bsky.social (Cardiff, UK) and Pierre-Yves Oudeyer (Bordeaux, France). Please repost!
#DevPsych #PsychSciSky #neuroskyence

Our new review, with Tyler Watts, Emma Hart, and April Yu, summarizing some work in the past few years on "Learning about Development from Interventions" is published open access at Annual Review of Developmental Psychology. Comments, questions, insults welcome.
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

From animal models to human individuality: Integrative approaches to the study of brain plasticity Hille et al. wish to strengthen connections between human research and animal models of brain plasticity. They propose to make greater use of macroscopic imaging methods in animals, intensify cross-sp...

Hello #neuroskyence! 👋

I am new here and excited to connect! 🎉

I wanted to share my first paper, published recently. We explore ways to strengthen the connections between human research and animal models of brain plasticity.

Check it out here: tinyurl.com/5fbbhs69

Happy to engage with you!

Neuronal sequences in population bursts encode information in human cortex - Nature The temporal order of neuronal firing within bursts of population spiking in the human anterior temporal lobe is dependent on the category as well as the identity of the individual stimulus, and this ...

Neurons in the human brain multitask! Shared neurons fire in bursts for multiple stimuli, but their firing order shifts to create stimulus-specific sequences. A clever, dynamic way the brain encodes complex info.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...