Yana Fandakova
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yanafandakova.bsky.social
Yana Fandakova
@yanafandakova.bsky.social
Developmental cognitive neuroscientist interested in learning, memory and cognitive control. PI of the Learning Brain Lab at the University of Trier.
Reposted by Yana Fandakova
What influences whether people have fun with a task?

Our paper “Leveling up fun: learning progress, expectations and success influence enjoyment in video games” with @thecharleywu.bsky.social and @ericschulz.bsky.social now in Scientific Reports!

rdcu.be/eI069

Paper summary below 1/4
Leveling up fun: learning progress, expectations, and success influence enjoyment in video games
Scientific Reports - Leveling up fun: learning progress, expectations, and success influence enjoyment in video games
rdcu.be
October 2, 2025 at 9:32 AM
Reposted by Yana Fandakova
Das ICAN der @unitrier.bsky.social präsentiert EEG, fNIRS und vieles mehr interessierten Kindern und Erwachsenen beim City Campus in Trier. Besucht uns gerne!
September 26, 2025 at 6:06 PM
Reposted by Yana Fandakova
Quantifying memory recall is hard! Luckily, natural language processing (incl. #LLMs) offers new, automated, and scalable ways to do that!

Great new review by Fenerci & @signysheldon.bsky.social in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social!
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
Studying memory narratives with natural language processing
Cognitive neuroscience research has begun to use natural language processing (NLP) to examine memory narratives with the hopes of gaining a nuanced understanding of the mechanisms underlying differenc...
www.cell.com
August 28, 2025 at 1:35 PM
Thrilled to see our new paper highlighted in this week’s issue of #JNeurosci: we showed that metabolites linked to neuropil contraction are related to gray changes in the PFC across childhood and adolescence #devpsyc #neuroscience #neuroskyence
This Week in The Journal #JNeurosci | A Mechanism for Behavioral Maturation in Male Mice; Exploring Gray Matter Changes in Childhood and Adolescence
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/45/30/etwij45302025
July 25, 2025 at 9:51 AM
Reposted by Yana Fandakova
What a fantastic effort. Truly inspiring to see brilliant people dig deeply into these meta scientific issues.

This is the best time to be doing neuroimaging.
1/11 Excited to share our @Naturestudy led by @leonooi.bsky.social @csabaorban.bsky.social @shaoshiz.bsky.social

AI performance is known to scale with logarithm of sample size (Kaplan 2020), but in many domains, sample size can be # participants or # measurements...

doi.org/10.1038/s415...
July 17, 2025 at 2:18 PM
Reposted by Yana Fandakova
This was such a fun conversation about childhood, play, and agency across cultures. Thanks for having @sheinalew.bsky.social & I on the show!
New episode!! 🎙️📣

A chat w/ @sheinalew.bsky.social & @dorsaamir.bsky.social about childhood across cultures.

Humans everywhere go through childhood—a time of learning, growth, and play. But this universal stage of life can look very different in different places.

Listen: disi.org/varieties-of...
July 19, 2025 at 1:50 PM
Reposted by Yana Fandakova
Discrete sites in the human insular cortex showed changes of ac vity that predicted later memory recall, while others responded to emo onal content. Smula on of memoryrelated sites showed direct influence over the hippocampus

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Direct interactions between the human insula and hippocampus during memory encoding - Nature Neuroscience
The hippocampus and insula communicate when processing emotional memories. Discrete sites in the human insular cortex showed changes that predicted later memory recall, while others responded to emoti...
www.nature.com
July 16, 2025 at 7:40 PM
Reposted by Yana Fandakova
If you're planning a study, search DANDI or OpenNeuro first to see if relevant data already exists. If you're teaching, incorporate open datasets into your curriculum, writes @bendichter.com

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/open-neurosc...
Data reuse represents an opportunity to accelerate the pace of science, reduce costs and increase the value of our collective research investments.
Data reuse represents an opportunity to accelerate the pace of science, reduce costs and increase the value of our collective research investments. New tools that make open data easier to use—and new…
www.thetransmitter.org
July 9, 2025 at 1:23 PM
Reposted by Yana Fandakova
When do girls fall behind in maths? Gigantic study pinpoints the moment

https://go.nature.com/4l1nC4g
June 11, 2025 at 3:20 PM
Reposted by Yana Fandakova
I’m excited to share our new preprint – led by @hyejinjadelee.bsky.social & Derek Smith – where we applied precision approaches (i.e., extensive per-participant data collection) to behavioral measures of inhibitory control.
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Attempting my first bluesky 🧵 in the following....
October 20, 2023 at 5:50 PM
Reposted by Yana Fandakova
We have an exciting new paper in PNAS on the stability of cognitive ability between infancy (7-9 months of age) and adulthood (~age 30). 1/4

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Stability of general cognitive ability from infancy to adulthood: A combined twin and genomic investigation | PNAS
Measures of general cognitive ability (GCA) are highly stable from adolescence onward, particularly at the level of genetic influences. In contrast...
www.pnas.org
May 30, 2025 at 3:15 PM
Reposted by Yana Fandakova
If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind.

Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!
May 30, 2025 at 12:18 AM
Reposted by Yana Fandakova
Interested in curiosity and metacognition in childhood and adolescence? Join us at Cardiff University (UK) for a Postdoc position in an international collaboration with @yanafandakova.bsky.social (Germany) and @pyoudeyer.bsky.social (France). Please repost! #DevPsych #PsychSciSky #neuroskyence
Job Search | Cardiff University
Search for Internet job results.
krb-sjobs.brassring.com
April 11, 2025 at 10:15 AM
Reposted by Yana Fandakova
How do changes in memory and experience across the lifespan shape our judgments and decisions? Together with @yeeleeshing.bsky.social @yanafandakova.bsky.social we have edited a special issue on the theme, check it out here: tinyurl.com/EPSpecial @dr-julia-nolte.bsky.social @loeckenhoff.bsky.social
The Interplay of Memory and Decision Making – Developmental and Aging Processes: A Special Issue of European Psychologist: European Psychologist: Vol 29, No 4
econtent.hogrefe.com
April 8, 2025 at 6:06 PM
Reposted by Yana Fandakova
This list looks really handy for teaching and research ⬇️
February 3, 2025 at 9:58 AM
Reposted by Yana Fandakova
New paper out in @pnas.org with @laurendinicola.bsky.social, Noam Saadon-Grosman, Mark Eldaief and Randy Buckner!

We revisited the functional specialization of the human hippocampal long axis across two independent datasets, with some surprising results.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
www.pnas.org
January 14, 2025 at 7:35 PM
Reposted by Yana Fandakova
Excited to share our function-oriented vision for the cognitive neuroscience of human aging, now out in Neuron: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

#neuroscience #aging
Toward a functional future for the cognitive neuroscience of human aging
Mooraj et al. outline why task-based functional neuroimaging must move center-stage to better understand the neural bases of human cognitive aging. In turn, the authors sketch a framework intended to ...
www.cell.com
January 14, 2025 at 10:57 PM
Reposted by Yana Fandakova
2024 synthesis of modifiable dementia risk factors across the lifespan. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
January 10, 2025 at 12:32 PM
Reposted by Yana Fandakova
"Curiosity shapes spatial exploration and cognitive map formation in humans." We are excited to share this novel paradigm and findings on curiosity-based exploration. This project was led tirelessly by @danlucen.bsky.social in collaboration with @cjhodgetts.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Curiosity shapes spatial exploration and cognitive map formation in humans - Communications Psychology
Across two studies using desktop VR, curiosity determined how much humans explored and how well the hand-drawn spatial maps they acquired corresponded to the rooms
www.nature.com
January 6, 2025 at 2:33 PM
Reposted by Yana Fandakova
Great overview on brain atlases here by Revell et al! Which one is best though? Well, it's not that simple!

None of them reflects "ground truth", and parcellation scale, shape, and coverage impact structure-function predictions.

Good discussion in the paper!
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
December 16, 2024 at 2:57 PM
Reposted by Yana Fandakova
Please repost! We are hiring an assistant professor (W1) of Educational Psychology. We are looking forward to working with you!!

uni-tuebingen.de/en/faculties...
Assistant professorship (W1) of Education Sciences and Psychology
uni-tuebingen.de
December 16, 2024 at 5:08 PM
Reposted by Yana Fandakova
Reposted by Yana Fandakova
We use our memories to make predictions – but what happens when our memories are outdated and our predictions are wrong?

@cnwahlheim.bsky.social & @jzacks.bsky.social review evidence for how memories can be differentiated or integrated in light of new evidence

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Memory updating and the structure of event representations
People form memories of specific events and use those memories to make predictions about similar new experiences. Living in a dynamic environment pres…
www.sciencedirect.com
December 12, 2024 at 3:54 PM