Researchers from the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Munich, LMU, and Cornell University reveal that zebrafish and fruit flies share the same internal compass mechanism, despite being separated by more than 550 million years of evolution.

An international research team led jointly by the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG), the University of Göttingen, and the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, has shown that nerve cells in the brain specialize in different tasks when processing visual information. The research focused on working memory — a complex network of different brain regions that stores and links information. A disruption in this information processing can lead to neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. The study results could help identify new treatment approaches for these disorders and have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Every time we move through a familiar environment, the hippocampus consults an internal map, a detailed spatial representation that is built up through repeated experience. But what happens when something unexpected occurs on a well-known route? Researchers at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) and the University of Bonn were able to demonstrate in a mouse model that the brain does not redraw its maps from scratch. Instead, it annotates them: preserving the underlying spatial layout while overlaying new information on top of the existing map. Their findings have now been published in the journal PNAS.

Our brain automatically compares new information with existing memories and links them together. Through this integration into our memory, we build knowledge. An international research team led by Prof. Dr. Lars Schwabe from the Department of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Hamburg has now demonstrated that acute stress negatively affects these processes in the brain. The study was published in Science Advances.

Even while listening, the brain attempts to anticipate the next words. This is the conclusion reached by a current study conducted by an interdisciplinary team of researchers led by PD Dr. Patrick Krauss, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), and PD Dr. Achim Schilling, Heidelberg University. The researchers combined three methods: a natural listening situation, high resolution measurements of brain activity, and an AI language model as reference. The higher the probability of a certain word occurring in the relevant context, the weaker the neural reaction during processing. At the same time, the data indicate a rise in pre-onset activity before the word begins, suggesting the brain works with predictions.

The human brain’s ability to filter relevant information from the vast amount of data it continuously receives is known as attention. Researchers at BIFOLD at the Technical University of Berlin, in close collaboration with scientists from the Kording Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, have developed a brain-inspired AI model of visual attention. What is particularly remarkable is that the model reproduces numerous well-established behavioral and perceptual phenomena from psychology and neurophysiology without these effects having been explicitly programmed into it. This not only advances our understanding of human visual perception but also provides a new perspective and framework for AI researchers. The joint study has now been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Beneath the tropical trees of southern Mexico, enormous shoals of sulphur mollies blanket the water surface of toxic sulphur springs, where survival depends on collective defence against relentless attacks from predatory birds. The tiny fish survive attacks of birds through creating spectacular collective waves. But new research now shows that their avian predators are adapting too, changing where they attack to avoid triggering the fish’s powerful group defence. The fish, in turn, appear to fight back with a surprising form of collective “memory.” The study by the Cluster of Excellence “Science of Intelligence” (SCIoI) in collaboration with the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) was published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

How do neighboring neurons in the cerebral cortex communicate with one another during movement? This is the question that Dr. Yangfan Peng is now investigating in his Emmy Noether junior research group at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. His goal is to establish fundamental structure–function principles of neuronal networks in order to deepen our understanding of motor control. The German Research Foundation (DFG) is initially funding the project for three years with € 1.25 million and, following a successful interim evaluation, has indicated the possibility of an additional three-year funding period of approximately 945,000 €.

How, when, and where do we remember events we have truly experienced? Researchers in philosophy and neuroscience in Bochum are working together to answer this question.

Following an adverse event, some people develop a stress-related disorder, while others appear to be more resilient. A joint study by the Leibniz Institute for Resilience Research (LIR), University Medicine Halle, and the University Hospital Münster has found that this so-called resilience is not a passive state but is instead subject to active changes in the brain. For the first time, tests on humans and mice have demonstrated that the visual cortex plays a special role in this, revealing a connection between resilience and the improved processing of visual information. It also appears that resilience can be trained. The findings were published in the Science Partner Journal Research.