News
Job opening
We are currently looking for a new secretary - please see the official announcement for more details.
Webinar on performance monitoring
Prof. Ullsperger gave a webinar with ANT neuro entitled "Multiplexed performance monitoring signals in the EEG in health and mental disorders". It is available here.
Succesful Defence of PhD-Thesis
On the 7th of march Franziska Kirsch succesfully defended her PhD-Thesis - congratulations Dr. Kirsch!
Succesful Defence of PhD-Thesis
On the 25th of april Julia Rogge succesfully defended her PhD-Thesis - congratulations Dr. Rogge!
Open Position
14.04.23: Open PhD position in the department of Neuropsychology. Pleas click here for more information.
Succesful Defence of PhD-Thesis
End of January/Beginning of February Camila Agostino (supvervised by Prof. Nösselt, now in the department of Neuropsychology) and Alexander Weuthen (supervised by Prof. Ullsperger) succesfully defended their PhD-Thesis.
Congratulations Dr. Agostino and Dr. Weuthen
War in Ukraine
We welcome Ukraine-based researchers in neuropsychology/cognitive control/computational neuroscience to reach out to us if they would like to apply for the Philipp Schwartz Initiative for researchers at risk by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to fund their stay with us. Please note the extended deadline: 18.3.2022.
M. Ullsperger has received an ERC Advanced Grant
Markus Ullsperger has received an ERC Advanced Grant for the project "The Medial Frontal Cortex in Cognitive Control and Decision Making: Anatomy, Connectivity, Representations, Causal Contributions (MediCoDe)". New PhD and postdoc positions will be available soon -- stay tuned!
Press release:
7th International Symposium on Motivational and Cognitive Control
First Announcement: 7th International Symposium on Motivational and Cognitive Control, Berlin, Sept. 16-18, 2019, check webpage for details
Looking for participants
We are currently looking for study participants, check link for details
Short-term reward experience biases inference despite dissociable neural correlates
Humans generally try to make good decisions. Sometimes, these decisions are based on experience, but sometimes we have to rely on abstract information because we have not experienced the long-term consequences of a decision before. For example, many people try to avoid fast-food, yet not because they have experienced weight-gain after eating, but because of information provided about its negative long-term consequences. In a recent study published in Nature Communications, Fischer and colleagues from the Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg and the Sorbonne Paris demonstrate that short-term reward experience biases our estimates of what is good or bad in the long-term despite knowing that these short-term experiences are irrelevant to the long-term outcome. A positive experience, for example the taste of fast-food, makes us believe that this decision is better even on the long-term, despite knowing that this is not the case. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers additionally found out that that short-term experience and long-term information are processed in separate regions of the human brain. However, they found overlapping processing in the medial striatum, an evolutionary old structure that controls and selects actions, and the frontal cortex, a brain region closely associated with higher cognitive functions and behavioural control. Surprisingly, especially participants of the study that were best able to estimate the true long-term consequences of decisions, showed a stronger influence of short-term experiences on the activity of control-regions in the brain and those regions that showed overlapping activity. This suggests that in order to make optimal decisions in the long-term, it is better to intensively reflect upon one's own immediate rewarding experiences rather than trying to ignore them. Link
Adrian Fischer receives Early Career Award of the DGPA
Dr. Adrian Fischer from the Department of Neuropsycholgy has been awarded this years Early Career Award of the /Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychophysiologie und ihre Anwendung (DGPA)/. The price is awarded annually for excellent research to a young scientist and endowed with 1.500.
German - Japanese Collaboration in Computational Neuroscience
The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) support a multiannual research project of the Departement of Neuropsychology. For more information please see this page.
Lecture Prof. Ullsperger held at the Fondation Fyssen
The lecture can be viewed on youtube.
Lecture Prof. Ullsperger „Performance Monitoring Signals in the Brain
The lecture can be viewed on youtube.