A science manager position is available at the Department of Psychology (scientific director: Christian Doeller) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. We are looking for someone to coordinate, in close cooperation with the scientific director, the relevant organizational and management tasks in support of the scientific activities in the Department. Our scientific focus is on cognitive neuroscience.
Gaining insight into the relationship between previously separate events allows us to combine these events into coherent episodes. This insight may occur via observation or imagination. Although much of our reasoning occurs in the absence of direct sensory stimuli, how mnemonic integration is accomplished via imagination has remained completely unknown.
On Thursday 20th April 2023, 3.30 pm CET, Professor Tom Griffiths (Princeton University, NJ, USA) will give a talk entitled “The rational use of cognitive resources”.
How does the brain deal with new situations? How does it make decisions? Mona Garvert and Christian Doeller from MPI CBS, together with Max Planck colleagues from MPI for Human Development and MPI for Biological Cybernetics, have investigated the underlying mechanism in the brain when we apply stored knowledge to new decision-making situations in a study currently published in Nature Neuroscience.
Human spatial cognition has been mainly characterized in terms of egocentric (body-centered) and allocentric (world-centered) wayfinding behavior. It was hypothesized that allocentric spatial coding, as a special high-level cognitive ability, develops later and deteriorates earlier than the egocentric one throughout lifetime. We challenged this hypothesis by testing the use of landmarks versus geometric cues in a cohort of 96 deeply phenotyped participants, who physically navigated an equiangular Y maze, surrounded by landmarks or an anisotropic one.
We are excited to continue our virtual Mind Meeting Seminar Series in 2023. This monthly event will feature presentations by excellent researchers from around the world who are working on fundamental issues in neuroscience and cognitive science.
Our memories are not stored in isolation. Rather, they form a dynamic network that can be constantly updated with new information, making us capable of learning. Imagine watching a suspenseful movie, full of twists and turns, in which you wonder who the wanted criminal might be. In the last scene, the grand finale, you discover who was the culprit all along, and in an “aha moment” you immediately connect scenes that were not connected for you before.
Memory, one of the hallmarks of human cognition, can be modified when humans voluntarily modulate neural population activity using neurofeedback. However, it is currently unknown whether neurofeedback can influence the integration of memories, and whether memory is facilitated or impaired after such neural perturbation.
On Monday 12th December 2022, 3.30 pm CET, Professor Yael Niv (Princeton University, NJ, USA) will give a talk entitled “Latent causes, prediction errors, and the organization of memory”.
It’s very important in sports, and in interpersonal relationships, too – perfect timing. But how does our brain learn to estimate when events might occur and react accordingly? Scientists at MPI CBS in Leipzig together with colleagues from the Kavli Institute at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim were able to demonstrate in an MRI study that our brain learns best in connection with constructive feedback.
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