Date: 12th May 2025
Location: PEG 1G 135, Westend Campus, Goethe University
Rebecca Gerwert Vaz de Carvalho and Karen Schallert, both living with multiple sclerosis, encourage a conversation about the significance of visible and invisible disabilities, historical contexts and necessary changes in the present, especially for people with disabilities at universities.
]]>Date: 7th May 2024
Location: PEG building, seminar room 1G 150, Westend Campus, Goethe University
In our ever-changing world, the ability to adapt to novel situations is essential. This flexibility relies on our ability to draw from past experiences and apply general principles to new situations. For example, when choosing from a menu in an unfamiliar restaurant, we instinctively apply past dining experiences to guide our decision. Such generalization is a cornerstone of adaptive behavior, allowing us to make informed decisions without relearning strategies for every new scenario. In this talk, I explore how the human brain enables such behavior. I will demonstrate that the brain constructs hippocampal cognitive maps, traditionally known for encoding spatial relationships, to also represent other types of relational knowledge, providing a flexible foundation for generalization and novel inference. When stimuli can be part of multiple relational maps, the orbitofrontal cortex selectively activates relevant maps tailored to the specific task. Additionally, our research reveals that with time and consolidation, the brain refines these cognitive maps into more abstract representations, capturing the broader relational structure of experiences beyond specific stimuli. In summary, our findings illustrate the remarkable adaptability of neural representations in the human brain. They demonstrate how these representations are not just static archives of past experiences but are dynamic tools actively reshaped to aid decision-making and behavior in ever-changing environments
Recording: Watch the lecture
]]>Date: 11th October 2024, 13:00 – 14:30
Location: PEG 1G 131, Westend Campus, Goethe University
How does the human brain transform experiences into concepts and how do we use those representations flexibly? Recent evidence suggests that the ability to extract commonalities and to mark distinction across experiences to build generalisable knowledge is supported by the same brain mechanisms that create cognitive maps of physical spaces. In my talk I will present a series of behavioral and neuroimaging (fMRI) studies that suggest that the hippocampal-entorhinal system encodes the structure of behaviorally relevant conceptual spaces, thereby supporting processes like rapid updating of category boundaries as well as the abstraction of category prototypes and inference of new states. Finally, I will consider the relation between representational mechanisms in the hippocampus and general cognitive performance.
]]>Date: 11th October 2024, 13:00 – 14:30
Location: PEG 1G 131, Westend Campus, Goethe University
How does the human brain transform experiences into concepts and how do we use those representations flexibly? Recent evidence suggests that the ability to extract commonalities and to mark distinction across experiences to build generalisable knowledge is supported by the same brain mechanisms that create cognitive maps of physical spaces. In my talk I will present a series of behavioral and neuroimaging (fMRI) studies that suggest that the hippocampal-entorhinal system encodes the structure of behaviorally relevant conceptual spaces, thereby supporting processes like rapid updating of category boundaries as well as the abstraction of category prototypes and inference of new states. Finally, I will consider the relation between representational mechanisms in the hippocampus and general cognitive performance.
]]>Date: 7th October 2024 , 12:00 – 14:00
Location: PEG, Seminar room 5G 170, Westend Campus, Goethe University
Neuroimaging has greatly extended our capacity to study the workings of the human brain. Despite the wealth of knowledge this tool has generated however, there are still critical gaps in our understanding. While tremendous progress has been made in mapping areas of the brain that are specialized for particular stimuli, or cognitive processes, we still know very little about how large-scale interactions between different cortical networks facilitate the integration of information and the execution of complex tasks. Yet even the simplest behavioral tasks are complex, requiring integration over multiple cognitive domains. Our knowledge falls short not only in understanding how this integration takes place, but also in what drives the profound variation in behavior that can be observed on almost every task, even within the typically developing (TD) population. The search for the neural underpinnings of individual differences is important not only philosophically, but also in the service of precision medicine. We approach these questions using a three-pronged approach. First, we create a battery of behavioral tasks from which we can calculate objective measures for different aspects of the behaviors of interest, with sufficient variance across the TD population. Second, using these individual differences in behavior, we identify the neural variance which explains the behavioral variance at the network level. Finally, using covert neurofeedback, we perturb the networks hypothesized to correspond to each of these components, thus directly testing their casual contribution. I will discuss our overall approach, as well as a few of the new directions we are currently pursuing
]]>Date: 7th May 2024, 12:00 – 14:00
Location: Seminar room 5G 170, PEG, Westend Campus, Goethe University
Despite an unprecedented number of women entering neuroscience, and decades-long recruitment and retention efforts, women continue to be disproportionately underrepresented in European academic tenure-track faculty and leadership positions. This Perspective focuses on two major career points where women exhibit diminished representation: the transition from postdoctoral fellow to junior professor and the promotion to more senior (tenured) faculty positions. We discuss below recently implemented country-specific and Europe-wide initiatives supporting equal career progression and propose further concrete steps to be taken to break down the structural barriers that prevent women’s progression up the academic career ladder as European neuroscientists.
]]>Date: 15th Feb 2024, 18:00 - 19:00
Location: Goethe University, Campus Westend, Seminarhaus, room SH 3.102
You can find the program here: Program Brochure
Recording: Watch the recording
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