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Lea Ypi @leaypi.bsky.social · 1d

no words

Young lives cut short on an unimaginable scale: the 18,457 children on Gaza’s list of war dead

Every name on a list compiled by health authorities in Gaza of the child victims of Israel’s offensive

www.theguardian.com

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Prof Rick Adams @drrickadams.bsky.social · 9d

Post doc job alert 📢! Announcing a v exciting job on a Wellcome-funded project in my group at UCL, looking at auditory hallucinations... Advert here 👀: rb.gy/230w8l - deadline is end of Oct. Please apply! 1/5

UCL – University College London

UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

rb.gy

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Anna-Lena Eckert @eckertal.bsky.social · 14d

Ayooo 👾 this is great, congratulations!! 😊🎉

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geoffrey, 💀 mode @parsnip.bsky.social · 15d

[logging on every day] man what

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Anna-Lena Eckert @eckertal.bsky.social · 23d

My amazing husband Majed worked *so hard* on this project for >5 years - finally published today @natcomms.nature.com 😍

Absolutely insane array of methods, looking at microglia proliferation patterns & cell-cell interactions after stroke. Proud moment! 💫

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

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Ryan Smith @rssmith.bsky.social · 23d

Big congrats to Marishka on this. I know how much time and effort went into it. Really happy to see it out! For those interested, she replicated prior longitudinal results using an approach-avoidance conflict task and showed how model parameters afforded out-of-sample clinical prediction.

Computational Psychiatry @cpsyjournal.bsky.social · 24d

New paper in CPsy - 'Computational Mechanisms of Approach-Avoidance Conflict Predictively Differentiate Between Affective and Substance Use Disorders' from Marishka Mehta and the group of @rssmith.bsky.social
doi.org/10.5334/cpsy...

Computational Mechanisms of Approach-Avoidance Conflict Predictively Differentiate Between Affective and Substance Use Disorders | Computational Psychiatry

doi.org

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Anna-Lena Eckert @eckertal.bsky.social · Sep 8

Science demos at the town fair in Marburg this Saturday 🧑‍🔬💫

Talking to Marburgers of all ages about the quirks of perception, & introducing the new DFG-funded cluster of excellence "The Adaptive Mind".

We showed Ames room, a color constancy demo, and hollow mask, size-weight & rubber hand illusions

Explaining the hollow mask illusion at the science fair: We do not perceive the "inside" (concave) of the mask, but it pops out and we perceive it as if it were a normal (convex) mask. Very quirky brains!

Demonstrating the rubber hand illusion (a rather improvised version of it) to some young experimentalists at the science fair

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Franziska Knolle @franziskaknolle.bsky.social · Sep 5

Thrilled to share that @cognemo.bsky.social and I are guest editors for a Schizophrenia Bulletin special issue on Computational markers of psychosis: From latent states to neurobiological mechanisms 🧠✨
If you’re working on this topic, we’d love to see your work!
academic.oup.com/schizophreni...

https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/pages/call-for-papers-computational-markers

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Matteo Carandini @carandinilab.net · Sep 3

The two key studies of the International Brain Laboratory @intlbrainlab.bsky.social are out today!

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature

The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...

www.nature.com

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Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · Sep 3

🧠 We're hiring a computational postdoc!

3+ years with me & @mitulamehta.bsky.social on @wellcometrust.bsky.social funded social cognition/paranoia research at the IoPPN.

Lead & develop computational work, collaborate with experimentalists on psychosis/THC data.

DM for details! lnkd.in/eCMy9Jf5

Computational postdoc ad for KCL funded by the Wellcome Trust on the NEPTUNE project

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Anna-Lena Eckert @eckertal.bsky.social · Sep 1

Yes! Lovely 2 weeks in the Swiss mountains with an incredibly bright and inspiring group of students 🫰🌄🧑‍💻

Will remember lots of late night sessions preparing the next day all while having great fun w/ the inimitable @esterner.bsky.social!

Joy in teaching - restored 💫

Elisabeth Sterner @esterner.bsky.social · Sep 1

Teaching at the #Studienstiftung Sommerakademie in Leysin will definitely remain a core memory of my PhD! Discussing computational psychiatry with such a curious, interdisciplinary group of students was truly inspiring! Sharing the experience with @eckertal.bsky.social made it even more special ✨

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Lilian Weber @lilweb.bsky.social · Aug 26

In other news, I am now a ✨ COXI ✨ (cognitive scientist in Osnabrück, Germany)

www.uni-osnabrueck.de/en/campus-li...

I'll be looking for PhD students & postdocs later this year, so watch this space if combining cognitive modelling, EEG & tFUS to study flexible cognition sounds exciting to you 🚀

New at the university: Prof. Weber!

Osnabrück University welcomes Prof. Dr. Lilian Weber! Since August 15, she has held the professorship "Cognitive Modeling" at the School of Human Sciences. A warm welcome!

www.uni-osnabrueck.de

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Ryszard Auksztulewicz @auksz.bsky.social · Aug 28

Job alert 🚨 Fully funded PhD position available in our Maastricht lab! Are you interested in predictive processing, individual differences, and computational modelling of behavioural and neural data? Please apply! #NeuroJobs vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastric...

PhD Candidate: cognitive computational neuroscience of individual differences

vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl

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Tobias Hauser @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social · Aug 19

📢 We are hiring! 📢
For our @wellcometrust.bsky.social grant on information gathering biases in #OCD and #Schizophrenia, we are looking for a Postdoc in Computational Modelling, supervised by Peter Dayan and myself.
Interested? See all the details in the job advert here: devcompsy.org/wp-content/u...

a penguin is sticking his head out of a hole next to a job application

ALT: a penguin is sticking his head out of a hole next to a job application

media.tenor.com

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Anna-Lena Eckert @eckertal.bsky.social · Aug 14

I stopped reading this one at the snowflake-as-computer line though 🥶

medium.com/the-spike/ye...

Yes, the brain is a computer…

No, it’s not a metaphor

medium.com

Anna-Lena Eckert @eckertal.bsky.social · Aug 14

binds.cs.umass.edu

On the Computational Power of Neural Nets (1995)

.: BINDS lab : WELCOME :.

The Biologically Inspired Neural and Dynamical Systems (BINDS) Laboratory at the Computer Science Department, University of Massachusetts, Amherst was created to advance research in biologically-inspi...

binds.cs.umass.edu

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Anna-Lena Eckert @eckertal.bsky.social · Aug 14

But obviously our brains are not "Von Neumann architectures" - digital human-made programmable devices. Those serve only as a weak metaphor for the brain

www.theguardian.com/science/2020...

Why your brain is not a computer

The long read: For decades it has been the dominant metaphor in neuroscience. But could this idea have been leading us astray all along?

www.theguardian.com

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Anna-Lena Eckert @eckertal.bsky.social · Aug 14

I actually learned a lot myself when preparing for this talk.

Some of my main sources...

Our brains might be computers in the sense of "devices capable of solving any computable function *in theory*" (Turing machines)

www.frontiersin.org/journals/com...

Frontiers | The Brain-Computer Metaphor Debate Is Useless: A Matter of Semantics

It is commonly assumed that usage of the word "computer" in the brain sciences reflects a metaphor. However, there is no single definition of the word "compu...

www.frontiersin.org

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Anna-Lena Eckert @eckertal.bsky.social · Aug 14

10 years after I came as a participant in 2015, tonight I had the pleasure of giving an evening lecture at the Studienstiftung summer academy in the Swiss mountains ⛰️

My talk on brains-as-computers fell on open ears and there were 45 min of super exciting questions. What a joy!

Standing in front of my conclusion slide that has a quote from Richards & Lillicrap 2022: "brains are either literally computers or not very much like computers at all"

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Anna-Lena Eckert @eckertal.bsky.social · Aug 8

Would love to be added and also recommend @esterner.bsky.social and @franziskaknolle.bsky.social 😊🚀 thanks!

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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · Aug 7

Never ask postdocs what they'll be doing next year, that's considered terribly offensive in their culture.

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Ondrej Zika @ondrejzika.bsky.social · Jul 14

Are you at #CPconf2025 and interested in inference and generalization?

@luiantaverra.bsky.social will present on aversive learning and avoidance, and how these are impacted by anxiety P1.67

I will present a poster on the role of internalizing psychopathology in contextual inference P1.72

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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · Jul 12

“The goal of academic training is not to solve problems as efficiently and quickly as possible, but to develop skills for identifying and dealing with novel problems, which have never been solved before.”

Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · Jun 28

If you agree with our 5 requests to our universities, please sign 🖊️ the open letter and don’t forget to confirm your email! ☺️🙏

openletter.earth/open-letter-...

• Resist the introduction of AI in our own software systems, from Microsoft to OpenAI to Apple. It is not in our interests to let our processes be corrupted and give away our data to be used to train models that are not only useless to us, but also harmful.

• Ban AI use in the classroom for student assignments, in the same way we ban essay mills and other forms of plagiarism. Students must be protected from de-skilling and allowed space and time to perform their assignments themselves.

• Cease normalising the AI hype and the lies which are prevalent in the technology industry's framing of these technologies. The technologies do not have the advertised capacities and their adoption puts students and academics at risk of violating ethical, legal, scholarly, and scientific standards of reliability, sustainability, and safety.

• Fortify our academic freedom as university staff to enforce these principles and standards in our classrooms and our research as well as on the computer systems we are obliged to use as part of our work. We as academics have the right to our own spaces.

• Sustain critical thinking on AI and promote critical engagement with technology on a firm academic footing. Scholarly discussion must be free from the conflicts of interest caused by industry funding, and reasoned resistance must always be an option.

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · Jul 8

nothing makes sense in computational modelling, except in the light of these two all-time classic maxims:

1. all models are wrong, some are useful - George Box

2. everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler - Albert Einstein

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Constantin Rothkopf @c-rothkopf.bsky.social · Jul 8

We have an open PhD position in an exciting @dfg.de - @ageinves.bsky.social project to further develop continuous psychophysics in collaboration with Joan-Lopez Moliner.

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