Nils Kroemer
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nbkroemer.bsky.social
Nils Kroemer
@nbkroemer.bsky.social
3.7K followers 1.9K following 290 posts
Neuroscientist | Professor of Medical Psychology at U Bonn | PI Neuroscience of Motivation, Action, & Desire Lab at U Bonn & Tübingen
aka @cornu_copiae
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nbkroemer.bsky.social
Forget about Wansink's bottomless soup. The Magic Table uncovers variability in gastric interoception in response to stress 🪄
Preprint by Kipping et al. #neuroskyence #interoception
doi.org/10.23668/psy...
October 28, 2025 at 1:18 PM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
Published now (after long last & 10 citations). Although tVNS does not alter food reward ratings in healthy people, it acutely improved liking ratings in patients with MDD (also correlated with anhedonia). #neuroskyence 🩺

Work w/ @akuehnel.bsky.social
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
October 11, 2025 at 11:40 AM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
How can we improve transcutaneous VNS? This study uses neural bridging to connect a cutaneous sensory nerve with the cervical branch of the vagus nerve, leading to a 3.5x increase in c-Fos in the NTS (vs. sham).
#neuroskyence 🩺
Sun et al, Neurotherapeutics
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Schematic of end-to-side neurorrhaphy and other surgery
September 21, 2025 at 12:01 PM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
When we encounter the same reward repeatedly, we show variable responses; is this just noise?
In our new preprint, we replicate the association of BMI and disinhibited eating with variability of NAcc signals to reward. #neuroskyence 🩺
W/ @akuehnel.bsky.social
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
The figure depicts the study rationale and procedures. We anticipated differences in reward sensitivity across groups varying in symptoms of binge eating, specifically in the variability. Patients with binge eating disorder (BED) have a higher variability in food wanting ratings during the effort allocation task in the behavioral session. Participants with a higher body mass index (BMI) show elevated variability of anticipatory cue responses in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc).
September 8, 2025 at 6:44 AM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
New preprint...and this one is truly EPIC 🚨.

Using a large group of patients with depression and healthy controls (N>800), we show differences in the functional segregation of insular subnetworks. And we can use it to classify!
Led by @glassybrain.bsky.social #neuroskyence 🩺
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Graphical summary of the analysis pipeline Decreased similarity within the anterior insula cortex drives group differences between patients with MDD and healthy control participants. This difference is illustrated by shift functions and compared to control regions in the temporal cortex. Patients with depression can be robustly classified based on functional connectivity profiles, and the accuracy improves with increasing symptom severity.
August 30, 2025 at 8:30 AM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
Do researchers’ financial conflicts of interest in clinical trials of internet-based interventions for depression affect the outcomes? This meta-analysis suggests that COIs may lead to inflated effect-size estimates. 🩺 #neuroskyence
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Forest plot of the effects of self-guided IBI for depression versus passive control group in trials for which RFCOI was present versus absent or unclear. Studies with RFCOI show larger effects.
August 19, 2025 at 7:18 AM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
While our official job ad is on the way, we are seeking PhD students to join @neuromadlab.bsky.social for projects running in Bonn.

The candidate will lead projects on body-brain interactions using brain stimulation to improve core symptoms of depression: www.neuromadlab.org/jobs #neurojobs
Image of a job ad preview.
August 13, 2025 at 2:45 PM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
Site note: Sometimes, it is easy to summarize a paper in one figure and the posterior distributions of the modulatory effects on stress-induced cortisol release work quite well here.
Posterior distributions of the effects of glucose, progesterone, and estradiol on stress-induced changes in cortisol release. The plot shows a glucose-related increase, whereas there is not enough evidence against the null hypothesis for sex hormones to date.
August 6, 2025 at 5:54 PM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
I grew tomatoes in my small garden this year, and it is truly worth it. It produces enough so I can enjoy a minimalist tomato salad every day, and it shows that simple dishes shine with a few great ingredients. The effort bias probably helps as well 😄.
A small bowl of minimalist tomato salad
August 3, 2025 at 7:19 PM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
Congratulations to our @neuromadlab.bsky.social very own postdoc Anne @akuehnel.bsky.social for winning the NITA at #SSIB2025. Perfect background for a scientific award as well.
August 2, 2025 at 8:30 AM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
Corinna @corcerebrum.bsky.social gave a beautiful talk on her core PhD project in the interoception oral session of #SSIB2025. I hope we can share the preprint soon. Our ghrelin study has led to many exciting findings and a big surprise.
July 30, 2025 at 2:48 PM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
Great presidential symposium on the first full day of #SSIB2025 including inspiring talks by @jfcryan.bsky.social, @ribeirocarlitos.bsky.social, Kimberly Smith, & Suzanne Higgs.
July 29, 2025 at 11:17 AM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
There are some similarities, but it is essentially building on our previous work published in Brain Stimul (now considering external input through a food bidding task): www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
July 25, 2025 at 3:16 PM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
It's SSIB time next week, so @akuehnel.bsky.social, @corcerebrum.bsky.social, & I will be traveling to Oxford. I will talk about how we can combine task fMRI with electrogastrography & tVNS to understand how internal + external signals are integrated in the brain. Happy to meet other SSIBlings!
A cartoon depicting a happy stomach and brain holding hands.
July 25, 2025 at 3:02 PM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
I made it to the @ibnsconnect.bsky.social conference in Tromsø, and it's a lovely place.

I just wish I had finished my slides in advance 😬.
A photo of the harbor in Tromsø with a snowy mountain peak in the background.
June 25, 2025 at 8:32 AM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
My favorite part of this project was that we can now show that modeling behavioral variability across runs is insightful for computational psychiatry. If you think that states affect behavior, we need to conceptualize parameters as distributions.
Using the full hierarchical model with individually estimated variability finesses the shrinkage of estimates by incorporating individual differences in behavioral variability. The figure demonstrates the advantage of the hierarchical model to capture behavior
June 21, 2025 at 7:33 AM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
Our big behavioral precision mapping preprint is out. Based on 1,486,950 observed choices in a reward learning task, we show that BMI is associated with higher and more variable learning rates. Binge eating was associated with lower reward sensitivity. #neuroskyence 🩺
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
To determine distinct learning and decision-making profiles in obesity and binge eating (BE), we combined ecological momentary assessment (EMA) in a large online sample with a neuroimaging study. The figure shows the elements of the paper. Binge eating (BE) is associated with reduced but more variable reward sensitivity. The panels show associations of BE with learning parameters and an fMRI-based reward sensitivity measure derived from the cue stage of an effort task (independent of learning).
June 21, 2025 at 7:33 AM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
Pulsed taVNS elicits pupil dilation. However, if sham feels as intense, there is not much left. Based on our comparatively large sample (94 participants, single-blind crossover), we show that a highly variable sham response explains this.
#neuroskyence 🩺
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
A plot showing that taVNS does not induce larger pupil dilation compared to sham. A plot showing that sham-induced pupil dilation is much more variable
June 16, 2025 at 8:43 AM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
Sections like this drive me nuts. You can do a systematic review with a living Bayesian meta-analysis. Still, people take these results as if they were opinions and move on because they want a simple narrative.

Also, if a meta-analysis finds no systematic effect, does that mean it's unclear?
June 14, 2025 at 7:20 AM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
We have stickers as new lab merch now 😀
A photo of stickers showing the logo print of neuroMADLAB
June 12, 2025 at 1:23 PM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
Emergency trip to the office on a holiday because...

I need to physically stamp a document for a pending visa application within 24 h so that someone can join our lab in July #DigitalFirst
A photo of the advanced equipment used to stamp an important document physically.
May 29, 2025 at 11:16 AM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
Isn't it a successful day in the office if you find a new bug?

Honestly, I don't think I have seen this one before, and I don't know what it is called.
A photo of a bug with red wings ready for take off
May 22, 2025 at 1:10 PM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
Vor kurzem hatte ich das Vergnügen mit den WDR Kinderreportern über Frühlingsgefühle zu sprechen - glücklicherweise musste ich zuvor bei Aprilwetter nicht mit in den Wald. Gestern kam der Beitrag in der Lokalzeit.

www1.wdr.de/lokalzeit/fe...
Ein Bildausschnitt aus dem Video zu dem Beitrag der WDR Kinderreporter
May 6, 2025 at 1:30 PM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
Hm, are you perhaps thinking of this paper?
April 24, 2025 at 6:02 PM
nbkroemer.bsky.social
Insightful combination of EEG and iEEG in a patient with epilepsy to study the effects of taVNS on heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEP) in the insula. taVNS enhanced HEPs, but the paper does not say the interaction (vs. sham) was not significant. #neuroskyence
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
An image showing the key results of the paper, including post-implantation reconstructed 3D T1w imaging of the insular electrode seen in the coronal plane and heart-evoked potentials per condition.
April 21, 2025 at 7:29 AM