From January: A paper from my postdoc with Alex Gail: tracking lab monkeys' foraging paths. It resembled what animals do in nature (traveling short distances most of the time, longer sometimes, very long rarely), but on a smaller scale. A simple RL model explains why. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
For the Intl. day of Women in Science, DPZ asked me about being a mother in academia. I brought up a concern, less known than the parental leave: banned access to work buildings. This is not challenged much, I think, because a pregnant academic is a minority of society: youtube.com/shorts/9sqY8...
Our new collaborative project is officially starting. Piyali and I will use machine learning to determine how attributing perception to others, based on their embodied cues, influences our choices www.ugaze.de/projects/how...
Our summer Erasmus student, Evangelos, wrote this about his summer internship experience with us. I am very happy that you achieved both a professional and a personal milestone, Evan! www.linkedin.com/posts/evange...
That’s how you know he is a baby of academics: Ewan has a pediatrician visit next week and just started to do new developmental skills! Deadline driven like the rest of us 😁
I have an open position for an M.Sc. thesis, with the potential to continue into a paid PhD. If you know machine learning and are interested in naturalistic decision making in primates, email me a CV: www.uni-goettingen.de/de/embodied+...
A paper from my first postdoc is now out in PLOS Computational Biology. There, I have compared three probabilistic models of response suppression: subtraction, division, and negative feedback, for salamander, mouse, and marmoset retinal ganglion cells. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
From April: We had a poster at the primate neurobiology meeting where Sara presented a side-by-side comparison of vigilance in macaques in the lab and the field. It's interesting to see how naturalistic our naturalistic experiments are! This is a shared project with Julia Ostner's group at the DPZ.
I have been back at work this week (although I never really left work!) after my son Ewan was born last December. He is a sweet and smiley little boy. I couldn't have asked for better.
This week, René will present a poster of one of our floor foraging projects at a foraging conference in Lyon, France. Check out the program here: sites.google.com/view/foragin...
From last week: René successfully finished his M.Sc. thesis. Together with Fabian Sinz and me, René developed a model to reconstruct the spiking activity of a population of neurons and tested it on neurons in the frontoparietal reach network (Data: courtesy of Alex Gail). Way to go, René!
From October 1st: Welcome Numa Koudsie to ECG as a new research assistant. Numa will work on a neural network model to predict foraging success in a group of lemurs. This is a collaboration with Claudia Fichtel at the Behavioral Ecology Dept. (DPZ) and Fabian Sinz at the Data Science Dept. (UGOE)
check out the article that Ayuno Nakahashi and I wrote for DPZ aktuell (page 25) about our experience at the Pint of Science, Göttingen. Too bad I missed Ayuno's cool experiment. www.dpz.eu/fileadmin/co...
from Sept 3rd: Thank you Tatyana Sharpee for visiting us in Goe on a short notice and giving a talk on using hyperbolic geometry to understand biological systems. We couldn't arrange online broadcasting of Tatyana's talk, but checkout this relevant publication: meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR2...
Wishing Hannah Lüschen, a member of ECG, the best for her next career step in one of the neuroscience M.Sc. programs that she has been accepted for. 🥳 Stay awesome Hannah! 🤩 Never change!
Many thanks to my colleague at the University of Konstanz and MPI, specially Ahmed El Hadi, for the great scientific exchange (still going on). Details about my yesterday's talk at www.exc.uni-konstanz.de/collective-b... (and I believe a recording will be available on youtube later)
We discussed Fan et al., Neuron, 2024 in ECG jclub, led by Hannah: gazes with social context (eyes or face of another monkey) are causally controlled by orbitofrontal cortex in macaques. The gaze following seems to be controlled by dmPFC. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38187638/
From March 2024: we discussed Hung et al in ECG jclub, led by Sara: The study fund a decrease in the number of microsaccades, linked to adaptation and learning in the visual system www.nature.com/articles/s41...
From April, 2024: We discussed Arseneau-Robar et. al. in ECG j club, led by Kacper: monkeys adapt their foraging based on experience and social context. Monkeys performed a foraging task with preferred and less less preferred food, competing with another monkey www.frontiersin.org/articles/10....
We discussed Cowley et al, in ECG journal club, led by Sara. They turned off neurons in Lobula columnar, one by one, then, trained ANNs to map artificial and real LC neurons, then predicted ANN's response to a wide range of visual inputs to infer tuning of each neuron www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Next week it is again "Pint of Science" Week, and we will be represented by Ayuno Nakahashi (@ayuno-n.bsky.social) and Neda Shahidi (@nedash.bsky.social). Looking forward to the talks at the Duke Pub and a cold brew 🍻. Cheers!
pintofscience.de/events/goett...
We will offer a workshop on observational learning at Intl. Conf. in Development and Learning. Here are the details: www.uni-goettingen.de/de/687263.html Looking forward to be back in Austin, my second hometown
Read the interview of DPZ Aktuell with me about science, life, cats, and everything else here: www.dpz.eu/fileadmin/co...
hbr.org/2018/03/crea... In a growth culture, people build their capacity to see through blind spots; acknowledge insecurities and shortcomings rather than unconsciously acting them out …How people feel — and make other people feel — becomes as important as how much they know.
My new paper in Nature Neuroscience, based on a free foraging experiment I conducted during my PhD. Macaques self-pace actions for a better chance of reward, and we decoded their subjective belief of reward, leading to actions, from dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Checkout my first, first-author paper, published today! <3
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
x.com/Melissa_Fran...
Artificial intelligence in primate research, a talk by my colleague Richard (in German) : www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rUh...
The days are going to get longer in the north hemisphere for the next six months. Happy Yalda, the sun’s birthday 🌞
'The loss, misuse, obstruction and sabotage of female talent in academia represents a stunning drain on the public purse.' #womeninstem www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Congratulations to ECG members and their collaborators at the cognitive Neuroscience lab for winning the marshmallow problem contest at xmass party! Well done folks ;)
