Welcome to SFB 1528 - Cognition of Interaction



News 1

Final Panel Discussion: Empowering First Generation Academics

On March 12, we hosted our final panel discussion on how to increase diversity in Academia. The topic was “First Generation Academics – How the Family Background Influences the Career Paths of Young Female Scientists." Our expert panelists – Zurna Ahmed, Holmer Steinfath, Britta Korkowsky, Charlotte Prauß and Ann-Kristin Kolwes – openly discussed the challenges faced by young researchers from non-academic backgrounds. These challenges include not only financial barriers but also self-doubt, uncertainty in the academic environment, and lack of understanding from their own families. But the panel also talked about seemingly simple yet significant hurdles in academic life, such as: How do I find a supervisor? Can I approach professors directly? How do I become a student assistant?

News 2

New Publication in PNAS: Understanding Local Learning in Neural Networks

How do individual elements in a neural network contribute to solving complex tasks? While both biological and artificial neural networks achieve remarkable performance, their local learning dynamics remain poorly understood. A new study by Michael Wibral, Viola Priesemann, and colleagues, published in PNAS, introduces a novel framework to describe local learning goals using principles from information theory. The researchers present infomorphic networks, which define learning objectives at the level of individual neurons through a parametric approach based on Partial Information Decomposition (PID). This allows them to unify different learning rules and tasks—including supervised, unsupervised, and memory learning—within a single theoretical framework. By making local learning dynamics more interpretable, infomorphic networks help bridge the gap between theoretical neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

Link to the paper

News 3
Photo: Tessa Frank

Strategic mate choice in Guinea baboons

A study by SFB members Will O'Hearn, Julia Fischer and colleagues reveals that female Guinea baboons court males more intensively when they show special foraging abilities. The study was conduced with captive groups in Nuremberg Zoo as well as habituated, free-ranging groups at our field site Simenti in Senegal. For the study, one male per group were taught to operate a special food box that only they could open. This allowed them to provide a valuable food source to their group. During this phase, there was a clear increase in the females' attention: they spent more time with these “specialized” males, groomed them more intensively, and behaved more aggressively towards other females in their group. Interestingly, this behavior decreased again after the food box was removed. This suggests that the females did not change their behavior based on a fundamental assessment of the male's abilities, but rather responded in the short term to the benefits they received from him.

To the Press release

To the publication in the Proceedings of the Royal Society

News 4

Keeper or corner? How the brain enables flexible decisions

Our brain is remarkably flexible in producing different reactions to supposedly comparable situations. The same sensory information can lead to different decisions depending on the behavioral context. One example of this is a penalty kick in soccer: a player can either choose the empty corner of the goal as the target or aim directly at the goalkeeper in the hope that he will jump aside. Both decisions are based on the same perception of the goalkeeper's position, but lead to completely different actions. A team led by SFB speaker Alexander Gail investigated how the brain implements this type of flexibility. Their results show that, depending on the requirements, our brain either reuses known neural pathways or develops new patterns to select movements depending on the context. Thus, goal-directed behavior and cognitive flexibility can be achieved in different ways, depending on the circumstance that made the flexible adaptation of behavior necessary. The findings help to understand why it is more difficult to adapt to some new situations than to others - whether in social interactions or motor tasks

To the Press release

To the publication in Nature Communications


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Speaker:

Prof. Alexander Gail

Sensorimotor Neuroscience & Neuroprosthetics

University of Göttingen & German Primate Center Göttingen

Kellnerweg 4,

37077 Göttingen

Tel.: +49-551-3851-358

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Scientific Coordinator:

Dr. Christian Schloegl

Kellnerweg 4,

37077 Göttingen

Tel.: +49-551-3851-480

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Administration:

Kerstin Renziehausen

Kellnerweg 4,

37077 Göttingen

Tel.: +49-551-3851-246

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