The ERC Advanced Grant “Material Constraints Enabling Human Cognition (MatCo)” at the Freie Universität Berlin aims to build network models of the human brain that mimic neurocognitive processes involved in language, communication and cognition. A main strategy is to use neural network models constrained by neuroanatomical and neurophysiological features of the human brain in order to explain aspects of human cognition. To this end, neural network simulations are performed and evaluated in neurophysiological and neurometabolic experiments. This neurocomputational and experimental research targets novel explanations of human language and cognition on the basis of neurobiological principles. In the MatCo project, 3 positions are currently available: 1 full time position for a Scientific Researcher at the postdoctoral level Fixed-term (until 30.9.2025), Salary Scale 13 TV-L FU ID: WiMi_MatCo100_08-2022, 2 part time positions (65%) for Scientific Researchers at the predoctoral level Fixed-term (until 30.9.2025), Salary Scale 13 TV-L FU ID: WiMi_MatCo65_08-2022

The Department of Psychology at the University of Miami invites applications for two full-time, tenure-eligible, or tenure-track faculty members to join our department in August 2024. One position is in the department’s Adult Division, and the other is the Cognitive & Behavioral Neuroscience division. The specific area for both positions is open. For the Adult Division, areas of focus could include basic research on affect, cognitive science, and/or mechanistic studies related to mental health or the impact of disparities. Scholars with expertise in lab-based experimental, neurophysiological, computational, and/or mobile health/digital phenotyping methods are welcome. Individuals with interests in data science, including advanced quantitative techniques, big data, and machine learning are also encouraged to apply. For the Cognitive & Behavioral Neuroscience Division, we are particularly interested in individuals who incorporate innovative and sophisticated cognitive, affective, or social neuroscience methods into their research program.

Up to 6 PhD positions in Cognitive Neuroscience are available at SISSA, Trieste, starting October 2025. SISSA is an elite postgraduate research institution for Maths, Physics and Neuroscience, located in Trieste, Italy. SISSA operates in English, and its faculty and student community is diverse and strongly international. The Cognitive Neuroscience group (https://phdcns.sissa.it/) hosts 6 research labs that study the neuronal bases of time and magnitude processing, neuronal foundations of perceptual experience and learning in various sensory modalities, motivation and intelligence, language, and neural computation. Our research is highly interdisciplinary; our approaches include behavioral, psychophysics, and neurophysiological experiments with humans and animals, as well as computational, statistical and mathematical models. Students from a broad range of backgrounds (physics, maths, medicine, psychology, biology) are encouraged to apply.

A fully funded 3-years PhD position (EU MSCA-COFUND program) is available at Aix-Marseille University (France) for motivated students interested in the behavioral, neurophysiological and computational investigation of multistable visual perception in healthy and pathological populations. The project is strongly cross-disciplinary, including psychophysical and oculomotor experiments as well as advanced computational modeling. It will also involve an international mobility at the University of Edinburgh (UK), as well as a collaboration with the psychiatry department of Lille Hospital (France).

The primary visual cortex (V1) directly projects to the superior colliculus (SC) and is believed to provide sensory drive for eye movements. Consistent with this, a majority of saccade-related SC neurons also exhibit short-latency, stimulus-driven visual responses, which are additionally feature-tuned. However, direct neurophysiological comparisons of the visual response properties of the two anatomically-connected brain areas are surprisingly lacking, especially with respect to active looking behaviors. I will describe a series of experiments characterizing visual response properties in primate V1 and SC neurons, exploring feature dimensions like visual field location, spatial frequency, orientation, contrast, and luminance polarity. The results suggest a substantial, qualitative reformatting of SC visual responses when compared to V1. For example, SC visual response latencies are actively delayed, independent of individual neuron tuning preferences, as a function of increasing spatial frequency, and this phenomenon is directly correlated with saccadic reaction times. Such “coarse-to-fine” rank ordering of SC visual response latencies as a function of spatial frequency is much weaker in V1, suggesting a dissociation of V1 responses from saccade timing. Consistent with this, when we next explored trial-by-trial correlations of individual neurons’ visual response strengths and visual response latencies with saccadic reaction times, we found that most SC neurons exhibited, on a trial-by-trial basis, stronger and earlier visual responses for faster saccadic reaction times. Moreover, these correlations were substantially higher for visual-motor neurons in the intermediate and deep layers than for more superficial visual-only neurons. No such correlations existed systematically in V1. Thus, visual responses in SC and V1 serve fundamentally different roles in active vision: V1 jumpstarts sensing and image analysis, but SC jumpstarts moving. I will finish by demonstrating, using V1 reversible inactivation, that, despite reformatting of signals from V1 to the brainstem, V1 is still a necessary gateway for visually-driven oculomotor responses to occur, even for the most reflexive of eye movement phenomena. This is a fundamental difference from rodent studies demonstrating clear V1-independent processing in afferent visual pathways bypassing the geniculostriate one, and it demonstrates the importance of multi-species comparisons in the study of oculomotor control.

The ability to organise one's body for action without having to think about it is taken for granted, whether it is handwriting, typing on a smartphone or computer keyboard, tying a shoelace or playing the piano. When compromised, e.g. in stroke, neurodegenerative and developmental disorders, the individuals’ study, work and day-to-day living are impacted with high societal costs. Until recently, indirect methods such as invasive recordings in animal models, computer simulations, and behavioural markers during sequence execution have been used to study covert motor sequence planning in humans. In this talk, I will demonstrate how multivariate pattern analyses of non-invasive neurophysiological recordings (MEG/EEG), fMRI, and muscular recordings, combined with a new behavioural paradigm, can help us investigate the structure and dynamics of motor sequence control before and after movement execution. Across paradigms, participants learned to retrieve and produce sequences of finger presses from long-term memory. Our findings suggest that sequence planning involves parallel pre-ordering of serial elements of the upcoming sequence, rather than a preparation of a serial trajectory of activation states. Additionally, we observed that the human neocortex automatically reorganizes the order and timing of well-trained movement sequences retrieved from memory into lower and higher-level representations on a trial-by-trial basis. This echoes behavioural transfer across task contexts and flexibility in the final hundreds of milliseconds before movement execution. These findings strongly support a hierarchical and dynamic model of skilled sequence control across the peri-movement phase, which may have implications for clinical interventions.

Temporal predictions are fundamental instruments for facilitating sensory selection, allowing humans to exploit regularities in the world. Recent evidence indicates that the motor system instantiates predictive timing mechanisms, helping to synchronize temporal fluctuations of attention with the timing of events in a task-relevant stream, thus facilitating sensory selection. Accordingly, in the auditory domain auditory-motor interactions are observed during perception of speech and music, two temporally structured sensory streams. I will present a behavioral and neurophysiological account for this theory and will detail the parameters governing the emergence of this auditory-motor coupling, through a set of behavioral and magnetoencephalography (MEG) experiments.

Neural representations of time are central to our understanding of the world around us. I review cognitive, neurophysiological and theoretical work that converges on three simple ideas. First, the time of past events is remembered via populations of neurons with a continuum of functional time constants. Second, these time constants evenly tile the log time axis. This results in a neural Weber-Fechner scale for time which can support behavioral Weber-Fechner laws and characteristic behavioral effects in memory experiments. Third, these populations appear as dual pairs---one type of population contains cells that change firing rate monotonically over time and a second type of population that has circumscribed temporal receptive fields. These ideas can be used to build artificial neural networks that have novel properties. Of particular interest, a convolutional neural network built using these principles can generalize to arbitrary rescaling of its inputs. That is, after learning to perform a classification task on a time series presented at one speed, it successfully classifies stimuli presented slowed down or sped up. This result illustrates the point that this confluence of ideas originating in cognitive psychology and measured in the mammalian brain could have wide-reaching impacts on AI research.

Migraine is much more than an episodic headache. It is a complex brain disorder, characterized by a global dysfunction in multisensory information processing and integration. In a third of patients, the headache is preceded by transient sensory disturbances (aura), whose neurophysiological correlate is cortical spreading depression (CSD). The molecular, cellular and circuit mechanisms of the primary brain dysfunctions that underlie migraine onset, susceptibility to CSD and altered sensory processing remain largely unknown and are major open issues in the neurobiology of migraine. Genetic mouse models of a rare monogenic form of migraine with aura provide a unique experimental system to tackle these key unanswered questions. I will describe the functional alterations we have uncovered in the cerebral cortex of genetic mouse models and discuss the insights into the cellular and circuit mechanisms of migraine obtained from these findings.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI), a leading cause of acquired epilepsy, results in primary cellular injury as well as secondary neurophysiological and inflammatory responses which contribute to epileptogenesis. I will present our recent studies identifying a role for neuro-immune interactions, specifically, the innate immune receptor Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), in enhancing network excitability and cell loss in hippocampal dentate gyrus early after concussive brain injury. I will describe results indicating that the transient post-traumatic increases in dentate neurogenesis which occurs during the same early post-injury period augments dentate network excitability and epileptogenesis. I will provide evidence for the beneficial effects of targeting TLR4 and neurogenesis early after brain injury in limiting epileptogenesis. We will discuss potential mechanisms for convergence of the post-traumatic neuro-immune and neurogenic changes and the implications for therapies to reduce neurological deficits and epilepsy after brain injury.

I will discuss our recent evidence showing that information about abstract rules can be decoded from neuronal activity in primate visual cortex even in the absence of sensory stimulation. Furthermore, that rule information is greatest among neurons with the least visual activity and the weakest coupling to local neuronal networks. In addition, I will talk about recent developments in large-scale neurophysiological techniques in nonhuman primates.

To communicate effectively, two individuals must take turns to prevent overlap in their signals. How does the nervous system coordinate vocalizations between two individuals? Female and male plain-tailed wrens sing a duet in which they alternate syllable production so rapidly and precisely it sounds as if a single bird is singing. I will talk about experiments that examine the interaction between sensory cues and motor activity, using behavioral manipulations and neurophysiological recordings from pairs of awake, duetting wrens. I will show evidence that auditory cues link the brains of the wrens by modulating motor circuits.

Investigations of the neurophysiological processes underlying animal behaviors are almost exclusively done inside the laboratory, typically using few animal models born and reared under artificially stabilized conditions. Yet, animals living in the wild have to cope with much complex and variable environments. Thus, while the laboratory provides the technical possibilities for physiological research, the field offers a more realistic perspective about the animal´s behavioral abilities. We study neural circuits underlying the visually guided prey and predator behaviors in a semiterrestrial crab. By combining lab and field experiments we have, for example, found that the level of predation risk experienced by the animals in the wild affects the responsiveness of identified neurons involved in the animal escape response. Using this and other results from my lab I will illustrate and discuss the importance of complementing lab with field studies in wild animals for understanding the neural mechanisms subserving behavior.

Learning the consequences our choices have as we interact with our world is critical for flexible behavior. Relational knowledge of one’s environment gives structure to otherwise-individual one-to-one stimulus-outcome mappings, providing a substrate to globally update behavioral contingencies in the face of changes in the landscape of reward. In the brain, this relational knowledge is thought to be encoded in the hippocampus (HPC) in the form of a cognitive map, while prefrontal regions, such as orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), are thought to instantiate subjective estimates of location on the map, though direct neurophysiological evidence is lacking. In this talk, I will present recent work demonstrating the causal relationship between HPC and OFC as nonhuman primates perform a reward learning task requiring them to learn and maintain knowledge of changing stimulus-outcome associations. I will then provide direct evidence that single primate hippocampal neurons represent an abstract map of the value space defined by the task. Finally, I use behavioral modeling to highlight one possible strategy by which knowledge of value space is exploited by animals to detect changes in choice-outcome mappings and proactively update their behavior in response.