Marit Petzka

1/9 New paper with @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social and @lindedomingo.bsky.social : “Characterising semantic prioritisation in visual working memory.”
Core question: when we hold visual info briefly in mind, what gets accessed first: perceptual details or semantic meaning?

Studentische Hilfskraft (w/m/d) | Forschungsbereich Entwicklungspsychologie

📣 We are seeking a student research assistant to join us in investigating how spatial memory develops in children using video games and fMRI
@markuswb.bsky.social
@lipmpib.bsky.social
www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/2285306/2026...

Registration open 🎉

MEEP – Heidelberg Summer School on Memory and Sleep

www.zi-mannheim.de/forschung/ab...

Our new preprint is out on bioRxiv! @doellerlab.bsky.social
We show that eye-movement sequences actively organize information by aligning with underlying structure and flexibly adapting to cognitive demands in working memory.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Long-term effects of working memory retrieval from prioritized and deprioritized states - Communications Psychology Testing items in working memory improves long-term memory, especially for deprioritized items. This benefit shows when WM retrieval requires continuous recall, suggesting self-generated reports streng...

Briefly not attending something may help you remember it later 🪄: new paper led by phenomenal PhD student Frieda Born (not on Bsky) out now in Comms Psychology:

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Super thrilled to finally share the results of our team effort, from the lab of the one and only @ayab.bsky.social. Hopefully it will stir interesting discussions about how the brain balances continuity and segmentation

Job alert!!

We're looking for a Postdoc and two RAs on a 3-year project examining the effects of smartphones on sleep and mental health in adolescents. Details below:

RA: tinyurl.com/7h6zrz2k
Postdoc: tinyurl.com/ykmsk757

Please repost :)

🧠 The Mind Meeting Series is back!
Organized by us & Bicanski Lab, featuring leading scientists in cognitive and computational neuroscience.

Our first speaker is @lukaskunz.bsky.social (University Hospital Bonn).

🗓 February 12 | 3:00 PM
📍 In person (Zoom available)

We look forward to seeing you!

Aperiodic 1/f noise drives ripple activity in humans - Nature Communications How aperiodic 1/f noise drives ripple activity in human brain and impacts on ripple detections is not fully understood. Here authors show that ripple detections should be driven by the 1/f noise, whic...

Ripple oscillations are central for memory and sleep.

But ripple detection in humans remains challenging. Here we introduce a simulation approach in @natcomms.nature.com as common ripple detectors mainly pick up 1/f noise and not genuine oscillations

👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#neuroskyence

Cognitive Neuroscience Research Laboratory Manager at University of Oxford Check out jobs.ac.uk for opportunities in professional services, including Cognitive Neuroscience Research Laboratory Manager. Apply today and learn more about the role.

Last week to apply! Cognitive Neuroscience Research Laboratory Manager at @oxexppsy.bsky.social (with links to @oxcin.bsky.social and @ox.ac.uk)

www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPZ833/c...

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...

How are memories consolidated during sleep?
Excited to share another preprint: hippocampal SWRs route memory content to the cortex via interregional co-reactivation of concept cells, optimized by slow-oscillation–spindle coupling. With the great @tschreiner.bsky.social @humansingleneuron.bsky.social

Efficient coding in working memory is adapted to the structure of the environment Huang et al. show that the brain optimizes working memory by compressing information when environmental regularities exist. MEG reveals distinct neural systems for abstract structure and item details,...

Our new paper, now published in Cell Reports, asks how the brain adaptively shapes its representations according to the statistical structure of the environment to overcome the limits of working memory capacity.

www.cell.com/cell-reports...

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.

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

How does the brain replay memories during sleep?
Excited to share our new preprint, the outcome of an extensive effort led by Johannes Niediek, showing that reactivation of human concept neurons reflects memory content rather than event sequence.

📣 We have a new PhD studentship (UK home students) at
@fbmh-uom.bsky.social funded by @royalsociety.org. Interested in human memory, VR, and neuroimaging? This is the project for you 🧠
tinyurl.com/memoryVRPhD
Application deadline January 31st!

Happy to share this early Christmas present 🎄: our paper about geometry- and locomotion-dependence of 3D memory got published in PNAS! Joint work with co-first-author Volker Reisner (@reisnerv.bsky.social) as well as Leonard König, Misun Kim & Christian Doeller
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/

BOLD signal changes can oppose oxygen metabolism across the human cortex, Nature Neuroscience

fMRI signals “up,” but neural metabolism might be going “down.”

In our @natneuro.nature.com paper, we demonstrate that about 40% of voxels with robust BOLD responses exhibit opposite oxygen metabolism, revealing two distinct hemodynamic modes.

rdcu.be/eUPO8
funds @erc.europa.eu
#neuroskyence 🧵:

The effects of task similarity during representation learning in brains and neural networks Nature Communications - Here, the authors show learning tasks with similar structures can initially cause interference and slow down learning, but both the brain and artificial networks gradually...

Our new paper, now published in @natcomms.nature.com , asks a simple question: when two tasks share a common structure, does the brain learn them more efficiently? Surprisingly, this was not the case. Thread below (1/7)
rdcu.be/eSwvU

Bridging Fields in Psychology and Neuroscience with Multidisciplinary Collaboration Strengthening collaboration to encourage novel research connections between scientific areas is central to the CIMCYC - María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence strategy . To encourage this, the CIMCYC has ...

It’s official! The postdoc positions announcement is here 🚀
If you know great candidates interested in attention, memory transformation and EEG, please help spread the word:
Project (ReDAS) -> cimcyc.ugr.es/en/informati...
Job offer -> cimcyc.ugr.es/en/informati...

I'm happy to share my debut as first-author with the recent publication of our article in #JNeurosci:

www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

Big thanks again to @tschreiner.bsky.social and the whole team who made this possible! 🧠🌬️

Asking informally: does anyone know someone who might be interested in a postdoc focused on understanding changes in memory representations driven by attention using EEG? ⚡️Thanks!

Disrupted Sleep: Mechanisms Linking Sleep Deprivation, Neurovascular Dysfunction, and Metabolic Pathways at Leeds Beckett University on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - Disrupted Sleep: Mechanisms Linking Sleep Deprivation, Neurovascular Dysfunction, and Metabolic Pathways at Leeds Beckett University, listed on FindAPhD.com

Please repost! Fully funded four-year PhD studentship opportunity on sleep deprivation and neurovascular dysfunction on the BBSRC Yorkshire Bioscience Doctoral Training Partnership, including annual stipend, research costs and home tuition fees tinyurl.com/ms7v2pcx

Structure in noise: Recurrent connectivity shapes neural variability to balance perceptual and cognitive demands in the human brain Does neural variability reflect random noise or a feature that benefits adaptive behavior? Using intracranial recordings in humans, Terlau et al. demonstrate that neural variability results from the r...

New work from the lab published in @cp-neuron.bsky.social by @jonasterlau.bsky.social and Jan Martini. We describe that trial-by-trial variability indexes recurrent connectivity across the cortical hierarchy, which supports reliable and flexible coding www.cell.com/neuron/abstr... (1/4)

Semantic Tuning of Single Neurons in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe The Medial Temporal Lobe (MTL) is key to human cognition, supporting memory, emotional processing, navigation, and semantic coding. Rare direct human MTL recordings revealed concept cells, which were ...

🚨Preprint: Semantic Tuning of Single Neurons in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe

1/8: How do human neurons encode meaning?
In this work, led by Katharina Karkowski, we recorded hundreds of human MTL neurons to study semantic coding in the human brain:

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Here is a chance for international undergraduates to come to Hamburg and work with the amazing @elbersgerd.bsky.social

Really enjoyed working on this with Luise @graichenl.bsky.social Congrats! 🎉

Another piece of evidence highlighting how important visual space and the oculomotor system are for humans (and other primates). 👀🧠

Entorhinal grid-like codes for visual space during memory formation Nature Communications - Eye movements during scene viewing are tied to grid-like codes in the entorhinal cortex. Grid signals are specific to later remembered scenes, covary with activity in...

✨My first first-author paper is out✨
Entorhinal grid-like codes for visual space during memory formation in @natcomms.nature.com ➡️ rdcu.be/eLRm2
Big thanks to everyone ‪@isabellacwagner.bsky.social‬, @tobiasstaudigl.bsky.social, @olejensen.bsky.social, @doellerlab.bsky.social, @clauslamm.bsky.social

New position, new social media account. After 5 fantastic years in Tuebingen, I moved to @yale.edu and the @wutsaiyale.bsky.social this summer - which means that I’ll be recruiting PhD students and postdocs. Please help me to spread the word and see current opportunities below 👇

Dynamic updating of cognitive maps via traces of experience in the subiculum In the classical view of hippocampal function, the subiculum is assigned the role as the output layer. In spatial paradigms, some subiculum neurons manifest as so-called boundary vector cells (BVCs), ...

New preprint from the lab and great work by Fei Wang. We show how subiculum trace vector cells can be modeled consistent with known effects in CA1. Traces are driven by a mismatch learning rule to keep associative memories in line with experience.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...