On the 14th of September, nearly 400 people from the interested public came to Ruhr-University Bochum to enjoy the BRAIN DAY 2022 programme. From our lab, Aylin Apostel, Dorian Röders, Farina Lingstädt and Fabian Berg were there to present our RUBubbles project, excite curiosity and answer questions about avian cognitive neuroscience.
In their study, William Clark, Matthew Chilcott, and Michael Colombo used progressive image scrambling to investiagte the visual system of pigeons. This procedure has not been used to evaluate neural responses in birds and offered great insights on visual processing of the anterior and posterior tectofugal pathway.
We are happy to welcome Jesus J. Ballesteros as a postdoc and member of our lab - eagerly looking forward to working with him on exciting new projects!
The second Avian Cognitive Neuroscience Conference took place here in Bochum, on the 11th and 12th of August 2022. We were very happy to listen to great talks, look at amazing posters and meet with people from the avian cognition community!
On Thursday, 28th April, Lukas Hahn defended his PhD successfully.
We are very proud of Lukas and his outstanding work! His excellent dissertation entitled “Proximate and ultimate causes of working memory capacity: Comparative electrophysiological studies in birds” was graded with summa cum laude.
Congratulations!
Today, we proudly congratulate our new postdoc Will Clark for his THINK@Ruhr Postdoctoral fellowship! In the next three years, Will is going to compare the neural coding principles of the avian visual layers with the primates, rodents, and computational models of object recognition.
Dorian Röders, Anne Klepp, Alfons Schnitzler, Katja Biermann-Ruben and Valentina Niccolai investigated semantic processing of onomatopoetic verbs (e.g., “tröpfeln”—to dripple) using MEG. Their findings suggest increased cortical activation related to onomatopoeias in linguistically relevant areas and extend our knowledge on cognitive simulation processes.
We’re happy to announce that ACN will take place this year on August 11-12 and we’re looking forward to seeing you all again – in person!
New preprint available on bioRxiv:
Lukas Hahn, Dmitry Balakhonov, Mikael Lundqvist, Andreas Nieder and Jonas Rose: Oscillations without cortex: Working memory modulates brainwaves in the endbrain of crows. https://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2022.02.01.478165v1