Anna-Lena Eckert
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eckertal.bsky.social
Anna-Lena Eckert
@eckertal.bsky.social
Post doc in computational cognitive science @ Uni MR
🧠 computational psychiatry, probabilistic graphical networks
🎓PhD from BCCN Berlin 👟 runner & 1st gen; she,her
🌐Homepage https://eckertal.github.io/personal-website
Pinned
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!
Reposted by Anna-Lena Eckert
This work is now out in Nature Communications! 🎉

Computational signatures of uncertainty are reflected in motor cortex excitatory neurochemistry: www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64702-6

Huge thanks to our amazing team! @beckyneuro.bsky.social @campsydept.bsky.social @camneuro.bsky.social
November 5, 2025 at 1:26 PM
Reposted by Anna-Lena Eckert
Merz Stadtbild-Aussage ist nicht nur rassistisch, sondern auch ein Ablenkungsmanöver: Unzufriedenheit soll sich an "Ausländern" entladen statt an der Politik, die versagt, lebenswerte Städte für alle zu schaffen. @keremschamberger.bsky.social @jacobinmagazin.bsky.social
Merz’ rassistische Ablenkung hat Tradition
Die Stadtbild-Debatte ist nicht nur ein Schauspiel des Alltagsrassismus in Deutschland, sondern auch ein Ablenkungsmanöver: Unzufriedenheit soll sich an Ausländern entladen statt an der Politik, die d...
jacobin.de
November 5, 2025 at 1:50 PM
Reposted by Anna-Lena Eckert
How does the brain find its way in realistic environments? 🧠 Using deep RL and neural data, we show that hippocampal-like networks support navigation, learning, and generalisation in partially observable environments—mirroring real animal behaviour. Now out:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroAI
Hippocampus supports multi-task reinforcement learning under partial observability - Nature Communications
Neural mechanisms underlying reinforcement learning in naturalistic environments are not fully understood. Here authors show that reinforcement learning (RL) agents with hippocampal-like recurrence, u...
www.nature.com
November 3, 2025 at 10:20 AM
Reposted by Anna-Lena Eckert
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
September 30, 2025 at 1:01 PM
Reposted by Anna-Lena Eckert
[logging on every day] man what
September 24, 2025 at 12:17 AM
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...
September 16, 2025 at 1:19 PM
Reposted by Anna-Lena Eckert
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.
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
September 16, 2025 at 4:16 AM
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
September 8, 2025 at 3:45 PM
Reposted by Anna-Lena Eckert
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...
September 5, 2025 at 2:26 PM
Reposted by Anna-Lena Eckert
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
September 3, 2025 at 3:46 PM
Reposted by Anna-Lena Eckert
🧠 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
September 3, 2025 at 7:13 AM
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 💫
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 ✨
September 1, 2025 at 8:30 AM
Reposted by Anna-Lena Eckert
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
August 26, 2025 at 12:07 PM
Reposted by Anna-Lena Eckert
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
PhD Candidate: cognitive computational neuroscience of individual differences
vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl
August 28, 2025 at 9:11 AM
Reposted by Anna-Lena Eckert
📢 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
August 19, 2025 at 11:32 AM
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!
August 14, 2025 at 9:32 PM
Reposted by Anna-Lena Eckert
Never ask postdocs what they'll be doing next year, that's considered terribly offensive in their culture.
August 7, 2025 at 3:20 PM
Reposted by Anna-Lena Eckert
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
July 14, 2025 at 9:10 AM
Reposted by Anna-Lena Eckert
“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.”
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-...
July 12, 2025 at 8:33 PM
Reposted by Anna-Lena Eckert
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
July 8, 2025 at 2:27 PM
Reposted by Anna-Lena Eckert
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.
July 8, 2025 at 10:12 AM
Reposted by Anna-Lena Eckert
In a study of professors, women got 378 new work requests over 4 weeks vs 118 for men. Women spent more time on service, advising & teaching; men on research. Orgs should track who is taking extra duties & ensure they are rewarded and distributed fairly. www.forbes.com/sites/kimels...
Being Too Helpful At Work Can Hurt Your Career—Here’s How To Say No
Women are more likely to take on behind-the-scenes duties at work—extra tasks like onboarding or event planning—and it's hurting their careers. Here's how to say no.
www.forbes.com
July 7, 2025 at 8:03 PM
Reposted by Anna-Lena Eckert
Here's a bit of spice. Brain research clearly needs to tackle more complexity (than, say, Step 1: simple linear causal chains). But that leaves an ~infinite set of alternatives. Here, @pessoabrain.bsky.social advocates not for just a step 2, but a 3. /1

arxiv.org/abs/2411.03621
July 2, 2025 at 3:39 PM
Reposted by Anna-Lena Eckert
Curious about the visual human brain, a vibrant and collaborative lab, and pursuing a PhD in the heart of Europe? My lab is recruiting for a 3-year PhD position. More details: www.rademakerlab.com/job-add
PhD position — Rademaker lab
www.rademakerlab.com
July 1, 2025 at 6:43 AM