News

May 7, 2025: This month, we started a new project funded by the DFG. Together with Alex Galvez-Pol and his group (Universitat de les Illes Balears), we investigate the mechanisms that integrate cardiorespiratory interoception with active sensing (project INTACT).
April 16, 2025: After 1.5 years of joint work in the “Brain-Body Analyis Special Interest Group” (BBSIG; steered by Marta Gerosa), we’re very happy to release the first set of open-access, Python-based pipelines for the streamlined analysis of peripheral physiological (currently: cardiac) data: here are the Github repository and the documentation (bbsig.de).
January 29, 2025: We centralized our open-science contributions (open stimuli, data, scripts, etc.) in a new section “Tools & Software”.
December 16, 2024: We (spearheaded by Antonin Fourcade) have released the AffectTracker, a tool to collect continuous, two-dimensional (valence and arousal) ratings of affective experience during dynamic stimulation (e.g., video): Bsky post, preprint, github repo.
December 2, 2024: As an approximation of computationally reproducible manuscripts and to bridge the gap between the code repo and the full manuscript, Simon M. Hofmann created a project documentation for the FaceSim study.
November 25, 2024: The 12th MindBrainBody Symposium (March 10-12, 2025) has been officially announced. We’re very much looking forward to it!
November 1, 2024: Welcome Can Bolat, Aileen Brama, and Héctor Leos who are joining us as student assistants.
September 27, 2024: Antonin Fourcade was invited as to give a plenary talk as a "Face of the Future" at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR) in Prague next month. Micha Gaebler is also looking forward to chair a symposium with Tahnée Engelen (other speakers: Heini Saarimäki and Vincenzo Catrambone) on “affective states and brain-body coupling”.
September 18, 2024: Lucy Roellecke completed her Masters in Cognitive Neuroscience at Freie Universität (thesis title: “Embodied Emotion: Decoding dynamic affective states by integrating neural and cardiac data”) with flying colors! Congratulations!
September 16, 2024: Simon M. Hofmann uploaded our study on “Human-aligned deep and sparse encoding models of dynamic 3D face similarity perception” as a preprint on PsyArXiv.
August 27, 2024: Come work with us! We’re looking for a student assistant in Berlin (10h/week, 1-2 years contract, deadline: Sept 15, 2024). Full job ad here.
May 29, 2024: Several MBE Group members will present at this year’s “Psychology & Brain” in Hamburg. An overview can be found here on the brand new MBE Group bsky account (and a “legacy” MBE Group Twitter account).
May 15, 2024: MBE Group “associate” Joseph Jenowein (age 10) created the beautiful MBE promo video “Organs/Organy”. The “stop-motion masterpiece” can be found here on the new MBE youtube account.
February 5, 2024: Two new preprints from the MBE Group: Fourcade et al. (2024) Linking brain-heart interactions to emotional arousal in immersive virtual reality (bsky summary) and Klotzsche, Motyka et al. (2024) No cardiac phase bias for threat perception under naturalistic conditions in immersive virtual reality.
January 9, 2024: We welcome Aleksandra Piejka, who won an MBBS Young Scientist Award last year and will spend the next 3 months with us in Berlin.
September 25, 2023: Congratulations to Agata Patyczek and Elias Reinwarth who successfully (with distinction!) defended their Master theses on fMRI gradients and acute (Agata) or chronic (Elias) stress. They’ll join us as PhD candidates next month.
September 1, 2023: Welcome to new group member Alex Kastrinogiannis, who’ll work in the 3DIL project.
July 19, 2023: We’re looking forward to starting a new BMBF project in September: “Objective and hybrid assessment of cognitive and fatigue-associated post-COVID symptoms with multimodal tools (EPSILON).” Together with Fraunhofer HHI (Berlin), the Clinic for Cognitive Neurology (Leipzig), and Charité (Berlin), we’ll combine immersive VR (cognitive measures) and wearables (vegetative measures) to characterize post-COVID symptoms.
June 10, 2023: Michael Gaebler will give a talk on “Advancing the study of mental states with (mobile) ECG: challenges, advantages, and practical approaches” at PuG 2023.
May 20, 2023: Felix Klotzsche presented his poster on “Decoding the neural representations of emotional faces in stereo- versus monoscopic viewing conditions” at VSS 2023.
April 3, 2023: We’re currently looking to fill a DFG-funded 3-year postdoc position (deadline: May 15, 2023). Details can be found here.
February 1, 2023: We started a new project on technology-supported motor rehabilitation in Rett Syndrome (TeMoRett), a rare neurodevelopmental disorder. TeMoRett is funded by the BMBF and a collaboration with clinical (Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin) and technical partners (Fraunhofer HHI). Among other things, we will contribute video-based assessments of a user’s cardiac activity and affective state.
December 19, 2022: neurohum.io, the website for our NEUROHUM project, is now online.
November 23, 2022: In 2023, we will start a DFG-funded collaboration (3DIL) with the UK and Canada on using immersive VR for eyewitness identification in lineups (more details). We’ll officially announce a 3-year postdoc position (key features: eye tracking, interactive mobile immersive VR, face processing) in early 2023. Please feel free to already get in touch.
October 5, 2022: Our “Berlin branch” is now officially located at the Max Planck Dahlem Campus of Cognition, MPDCC (in addition to the location at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain).
October 4, 2022: A slightly different version of the feature on the NEUROHUM project was presented in the TV show 3sat NANO (starting at 15:10)
June 28, 2022: Our work on virtual humans was featured in the ZDF show “Leschs Kosmos” (starting at 15:00)
April 5, 2022: We are looking for two doctoral researchers (deadline: May 1, 2022).
March 2022: We have several positions to be filled. Please see the section “work with us”.
February 18, 2022: Michael Gaebler talked about our research on VR and emotions in the ACM SIGGRAPH Spotlight podcast.
December 17, 2021: The paper "Decoding subjective emotional arousal from EEG during an immersive virtual reality experience" has been published: press release, eLife digest, twitter thread.
December 16, 2021: Janis Reinelt successfully defended his MD thesis on "Mind-brain-body interactions after acute psychosocial stress" at Leipzig University. Congratulations, Dr. Reinelt!
December 3, 2021: Marie Uhlig's preprint "Rapid volumetric brain changes after acute psychosocial stress" is now available on bioRxiv.
November 23, 2021: Announcement of the 9th MindBrainBody Symposium (register here)
October 1, 2021: Our project "Mobile immersive virtual reality based assessment of spatial neglect" (3DIA) started.
June 16, 2021: Stella Kunzendorf successfully defended her MD thesis on "The modulation of active information sampling across the cardiac cycle" at the Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Congratulations, Dr. Kunzendorf!
June 8, 2021: Our project "Neurocognitively-guided modeling of virtual humans for enhanced realism in immersive media" (NEUROHUM) started. (press release by collaboration partner Fraunhofer HHI)
March 18, 2021: Deniz Kumral successfully defended her PhD thesis on "Variability in heart and brain activity across the adult lifespan" at the Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Congratulations, Dr. Kumral!