It's hard to imagine a better supervisor than Ondrej. Go be the lucky ones working with him :)

Ondrej Zika@ondrejzika.bsky.social · 2w ago

🚨 💫 💥 Interested in PhD / Postdoc opportunities in computational psychiatry / cognitive neuroscience? My lab at University College Dublin 🇮🇪 is currently accepting expressions of interest for internally funded PhD/Postdoc applications for positions starting in September 2027 (!). 1/

Super excited to share this preprint! How do we disentangle underlying structure from the particular features of a learning episode to benefit future learning? We find that memory reactivation during sleep promotes this structure abstraction process. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

💥New paper out! Why do some people generalise threat more than others? We show that anxious people generalise more strongly, even after accounting for perceptual mistakes. A huge (!) thanks to @ondrejzika.bsky.social @nicoschuck.bsky.social and @bernhardspitzer.bsky.social

Communications Psychology@commspsychol.nature.com · 6mo ago

Anxiety is associated with increased generalisation of threat to similar stimuli. This paper dissociates perceptual mistakes from value generalisation and links stronger value-transfer to trait anxiety. @nicoschuck.bsky.social @ondrejzika.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44...

How do we achieve few-shot generalization? New work led by @fabianrenz.bsky.social dives into the role of replay in learning and using structure to generalize reward. Dream team effort with Shany Grossman @nathanieldaw.bsky.social Peter Dayan & @doellerlab.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Really thrilled that this paper led by @neurozz.bsky.social is now published in its final version in @elife.bsky.social!! This is a memory-focused (as opposed to RL-focused) account of the detailed characteristics of forward and backward awake and sleep replay! elifesciences.org/articles/99931

A unifying account of replay as context-driven memory reactivation

A context-driven memory model simulates a wide range of characteristics of waking and sleeping hippocampal replay, providing a new account of how and why replay occurs.

elifesciences.org

In misty Porto for #ICON2025 and excited for all the science this week. I’m giving a talk tomorrow morning on insight in neural networks and humans at the « Sudden Learning Across Systems » symposium. Looking forward to discussing spontaneous cognition!

Delighted to share our work on replay and successor representations! We find replay during very short task pauses in human visual cortex that is linked to learning SRs & happens when learning is implicit. Study led by @lnnrtwttkhn.bsky.social #compneuro #neuroskyence www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Replay in the human visual cortex during brief task pauses is linked to implicit learning of successor representations | PNAS

Humans can implicitly learn about multistep sequential relationships between events in the environment from their statistical co-occurrence. Theore...

pnas.org

So proud of my partner’s performance at #CCN25 in collaboration with aiar collective. EEG-modulated live set where different frequencies change the sound of the synthesizer. Speakers and light tubes are synced to the different EEG channels. I’m biased, but I think this is so cool!

Interested in how emotions surface in dreams across the night? In this new paper, Jessica Palmieri, @valentinaelce.bsky.social and I report about the “Nightly dynamics of emotional content in dreams.” doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

Finishing the media spree tomorrow morning at 11.10 on @rbb24.de - really blown away by the media attention that our paper has received. Seeing our work covered in print in The Times the day after my 30th birthday was a pretty sweet gift :)

Nico Schuck@nicoschuck.bsky.social · last yr.

Also note that Anika's been on a media spree sharing our research. Catch her for instance on BBC4 live tonight at 6:10pm, or listen in on this NPR podcast: www.npr.org/2025/06/27/1...

Interested in whether sleep and (a)periodic EEG activity increase the probability to have an insight? ⬇️⬇️⬇️ Thanks to @anikaloewe.bsky.social, @nicoschuck.bsky.social & Maria Tzegka for a great teamwork. I really enjoyed it!

Nico Schuck@nicoschuck.bsky.social · last yr.

Excited to share our latest work spearheaded by @anikaloewe.bsky.social & @maritpetzka.bsky.social. 20 min naps increased the chance to solve an insight task if sleep reached N2 stage; but the EEG spectral slope was the best predictor of insight dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour... #compneuro #psychscisky

Super happy to see our latest work out in @plosbiology.org : N2 sleep during short naps increased the likelihood of insight in a decision task. The steepness of the spectral slope best predicted insight, beyond sleep stages alone. With dream team @maritpetzka.bsky.social @nicoschuck.bsky.social

PLOS Biology@plosbiology.org · last yr.

That "Aha!" moment... Can sleep facilitate memory reorganization? @nicoschuck.bsky.social @anikaloewe.bsky.social @maritpetzka.bsky.social &co reveal that N2 #sleep (but not N1) increases likelihood of having an 'aha' moment about a previous #DecisionMaking task @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4k8F2v3

Excited to share our latest work spearheaded by @anikaloewe.bsky.social & @maritpetzka.bsky.social. 20 min naps increased the chance to solve an insight task if sleep reached N2 stage; but the EEG spectral slope was the best predictor of insight dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour... #compneuro #psychscisky

N2 sleep promotes the occurrence of ‘aha’ moments in a perceptual insight task

Sleep supports memory consolidation, but can it also facilitate memory reorganization? This study reveals that N2 sleep, but not N1 sleep during a nap, increases the likelihood of having an 'aha' mome...

dx.plos.org

Which oscillations support memory reprocessing in the sleeping brain? 🧠💭💤 At #PuG2025, I will present data by Jessica Palmieri indicating that “Both Slow Waves and Sleep Spindles are Essential for Successful Targeted Memory Reactivation.” Poster: B 235 📅 Fri, 20.06.2025, 13:00 – 14:30 📍2.XXX, Z6

New preprint! How do we integrate new information into prior knowledge? We find that existing knowledge enables rapid new learning but that interleaved replay during sleep promotes integration of new and old information. Modeling suggests a sleep context suppression mechanism. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Very excited to be part of this symposium at @pug2025.bsky.social where I will discuss the role of anxiety in inference :)

Ecem Tavacioglu@ecemtavacioglu.bsky.social · last yr.

Only a few days left until @pug2025.bsky.social – our symposium, organized together with @gamerlab.bsky.social 🧠⚡ 🎤 Join us for exciting talks by: @ondrejzika.bsky.social @francescotortora.bsky.social @ldeserno.bsky.social @florianschlagenhauf #PUG2025 #psychophysiology #reinforcementlearning

In the next #BrAInWorldsJournalClub, Anika Löwe @anikaloewe.bsky.social will present the work of Jacob Bakermans @bakermansjjw.bsky.social & Tim Behrens @behrenstimb.bsky.social (2025): doi.org/10.1038/s41593-025-01908-3. Join @ilka-diester.bsky.social & @mschoenauer.bsky.social for the discussion!

Super excited about this!

Johannah Völler@jvoeller.bsky.social · last yr.

📣 ICON Symposium Really excited to announce our symposium at @ICON this year on Sudden Learning Across Systems! Together with lots of cool people: @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social @lindedomingo.bsky.social @ortiztudela.bsky.social @anikaloewe.bsky.social @jazzmaniatico.bsky.social and Andrea Greve!

Does Sleeping on a idea work? Nice to see our work led by the amazing @anikaloewe.bsky.social and @maritpetzka.bsky.social featured together with other studies in the WaPo: www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/202... Our preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Does sleeping on an idea work? Here’s what science says.

Scientists are finding experimental evidence that the transition between wakefulness and sleep is a portal for creative thought.

washingtonpost.com

Does sleep affect the relationship between representations formed in different memory systems? Check out our new preprint on how sleep resolves the competition between explicit and implicit memory: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Sleep Resolves Competition Between Explicit and Implicit Memory Systems

Sleep supports stabilization of explicit, declarative memory and benefits implicit, procedural memory. In addition, sleep may change the quality of memory representations. Explicit and implicit learni...

biorxiv.org

New preprint out with @summerfieldlab.bsky.social! When does new learning interfere with existing knowledge? We compare continual learning in humans and artificial neural networks, revealing similar patterns of transfer & catastrophic interference (1/8) osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨💫🤖 RLDM Workshop announcement: "Game on: Leveraging Gamification in Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience" Contributed talks submissions now OPEN: shorturl.at/0p0Jd Looking forward to seeing you in Dublin! w/ @luiantaverra.bsky.social & @ingrdmrtn.bsky.social

Life updates: I defended my thesis and moved to the mountains to do a Postdoc with @mschoenauer.bsky.social - excited to continue working on learning and sleep ⛰️🌙

🚨Job alert‼️🚨 The Imaging Memory and Consolidation Lab @unifreiburg.bsky.social is looking for a PhD candidate interested in sleep and memory in aging! 🧠💤 Please spread the news!

Deniz Kumral@denizkumral.bsky.social · 2y ago

My 1st message: “hello world” My 2nd message: JOB ALERT- please share❗ We are looking for 1 PhD candidate If you are interested in #sleep and #memory reprocesing in aging, please get in touch!

Our work on inductive biases in reinforcement learning is out: tinyurl.com/yfc74e3u By the fantastic @noahedrich.bsky.social Ppl learn faster from slowly changing features; we argue this reflects an inductive bias. Teamwork w @ericschulz.bsky.social & S HallMcMaster #neuroskyence #compneuro

An inductive bias for slowly changing features in human reinforcement learning

Author summary Learning experiments in the laboratory are often assumed to exist in a vacuum, where participants solve a given task independently of how they learn in more natural circumstances. But h...

journals.plos.org

Happy to share our review on OFC/vmPFC representations in Trends in Neurosciences, written with @nirmoneta.bsky.social and Shany Grossman www.cell.com/trends/neuro... Very short thread below to summarize our review #neuroscience #neuroskyence #compneurosky #PsychSciSky

interested in abrupt shifts in behavioral strategy, and which factors can cause them in neural nets? anika elegantly boiled it down to the simplest case and shows that noise, gating and regularisation can make very simple neural nets „pop“. truly enjoyed this collab in a great team

Anika Löwe@anikaloewe.bsky.social · 2y ago

First post here: our latest paper on insight-like learning dynamics (and the factors causing them) in humans and ANNs journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol... published last month in PLoS Comp Bio. with @nicoschuck.bsky.social @summerfieldlab.bsky.social @saxelab.bsky.social Paul Muhle-Karbe and Léo Touzo

First post here: our latest paper on insight-like learning dynamics (and the factors causing them) in humans and ANNs journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol... published last month in PLoS Comp Bio. with @nicoschuck.bsky.social @summerfieldlab.bsky.social @saxelab.bsky.social Paul Muhle-Karbe and Léo Touzo

Abrupt and spontaneous strategy switches emerge in simple regularised neural networks

Author summary Insights, or aha-moments, are a remarkable phenomenon in human cognition that is unique in a number of ways: they are accompanied by a powerful subjective experience, occur abruptly aft...

journals.plos.org