Event archive

Professor Carsten Finke | The hippocampus in neurological disease - a clinical neuroscience perspective

Guest Lecture
  • Date: May 18, 2026
  • Time: 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Professor Carsten Finke
  • Department of Neurology with Experimental Neurology, Charitè - University Medicine Berlin, Germany
  • Location: MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
  • Room: Wilhelm Wundt Room (A400) + Zoom Meeting (hybrid mode)
  • Host: Department of Neurology
[more]

Matlab (Scientific Course)

  • Start: May 18, 2026 10:00 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • End: May 20, 2026 03:00 PM
  • Speaker: Dr Falk Eippert
  • Location: Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
  • Room: Computer Training Room (A412)
  • Host: IMPRS CoNI
  • Contact: imprs-coni@cbs.mpg.de
[more]

Dr Jennifer Li & Dr Drew Robson | Uncovering the neural mechanisms of spatial cognition with behavior-aware autonomous microscopes

Mind Meeting
  • Date: May 7, 2026
  • Time: 03:00 PM - 04:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Dr Jennifer Li & Dr Drew Robson
  • Max Planck Research Group Leaders, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany
  • Location: MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
  • Room: Wilhelm Wundt Room (A400) + Zoom Meeting (hybrid mode)
  • Host: Department of Psychology
  • Contact: doeller-office@cbs.mpg.de
A core technological challenge in neuroscience remains the inability to access most of the brain, most of the time, across most of an animal's lifespan. To overcome this limitation, my lab develops self-driving tracking microscopes that enable brain-wide, cellular-resolution calcium imaging in freely moving larval zebrafish. Using this platform, we have uncovered the neural correlates of exploitation-exploration states during foraging, revealed novel sleep substates with distinct eye-movement kinematics, and discovered place cells for the first time in a non-amniote animal. The existence of place cell in the larval zebrafish brain suggests that abstract spatial cognitive representations can be generated by a compact neural network of only 100,000 neurons, opening the door to brain-wide mechanistic analysis of the underlying circuitry. Building on these discoveries, my lab is now focused on 1) uncovering the neural architectures that underlie spatial cognition in the vertebrate brain through joint analysis of brain-wide activity and brain-wide synaptic connectivity in the same animal, and 2) understanding the developmental processes that expand spatial representational capacity over time. I will highlight engineering efforts to create autonomous systems with embedded intelligence that enable whole-brain recording across circadian and developmental timescales without human intervention, making it possible to directly track the emergence, stabilization, and reorganization of spatial cognitive networks within a single animal over development. [more]

Dr Jakob Roth | Novel Imaging Algorithms for k-Space Data

Guest Lecture
  • Date: May 4, 2026
  • Time: 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Dr Jakob Roth
  • Max Planck Computing and Data Facility (MPCDF), Garching, Germany
  • Location: MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
  • Room: Lecture Hall (C101)
  • Host: Department of Neurophysics
  • Contact: amuehlberg@cbs.mpg.de
[more]

Cognitive Coding (Advanced Course)

IMPRS CoNI Lecture Series
  • Start: Apr 28, 2026 10:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • End: Apr 30, 2026 03:00 PM
  • Speaker: Simone Viganò, Yangwen Xu & Shira Baror
  • Location: Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
  • Room: Charlotte Buehler Room (C402)
  • Host: IMPRS CoNI Coordination
  • Contact: imprs-coni@cbs.mpg.de
[more]

Dr Isabelle Dautriche | The development of compositionality in language and thought

Guest Lecture
  • Date: Apr 27, 2026
  • Time: 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Dr Isabelle Dautriche
  • Centre de Recherche en Psychologie et en Neurosciences (CNRS), Aix-Marseille University, France
  • Room: Zoom Meeting
  • Host: Minerva Fast Track Group Milestones of Early Cognitive Development
[more]

Winning teams of the Algonauts Challenge 2025 (from the groups of Dr. Andrej Bicanski and Dr. Nico Scherf) | Algonauts Challenge 2025: Insights from the Three Winning Teams

Guest Lecture
  • Date: Apr 21, 2026
  • Time: 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Winning teams of the Algonauts Challenge 2025 (from the groups of Dr. Andrej Bicanski and Dr. Nico Scherf)
  • Location: MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
  • Room: Lecture Hall (C101) + Zoom Meeting (hybrid mode)
  • Host: CBS CoCoNUT
[more]

Professor Marc Tittgemeyer | Minding the Body – Metabolic Modulation of Motivated Behaviour

MPSCog Cognition Colloquium
  • Date: Apr 20, 2026
  • Time: 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Professor Marc Tittgemeyer
  • Location: MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
  • Room: virtual
  • Host: Max Planck School of Cognition
[more]

Dr Hossein Adeli | Brain Encoding and Decoding with Transformer Attention

Guest Lecture
  • Date: Apr 9, 2026
  • Time: 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Dr Hossein Adeli
  • Columbia University, New York, USA
  • Location: MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
  • Room: virtual
  • Host: CBS CoCoNUT
The attention mechanism, central to the transformer architecture, has emerged as a powerful and scalable computational motif underlying many recent advances in machine learning. Beyond its success in AI, attention offers a compelling framework for building interpretable, mechanistically grounded models of brain function. In this talk, I will present a line of work exploring this potential across encoding and decoding. I will begin with Transformer brain encoders, in which attention is used to model how retinotopic visual features are dynamically routed to category-selective areas in high-level visual cortex, achieving state of the art encoding performance. I will then describe how this framework was extended to construct a digital twin of the visual system, enabling in silico experiments that reveal categorical visual selectivity across the whole brain. A third line of work leverages the in-context learning property of transformers to build encoding models that generalize across subjects and datasets. Finally, I will present our work on interpretable decoding models that reconstruct images from brain activity using attention-based architectures. [more]

Prof. Virginie van Wassenhove | Making sense of time (in the brain)

Mind Meeting
  • Date: Apr 2, 2026
  • Time: 03:00 PM - 04:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Prof. Virginie van Wassenhove
  • CEA, DRF/institute Joliot, NeuroSpin; INSERM, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit; Université Paris-Saclay, France
  • Location: MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
  • Room: Wilhelm Wundt Room (A400) + Zoom Meeting (hybrid mode)
  • Host: Department of Psychology
  • Contact: doeller-office@cbs.mpg.de
How the brain tells time is fundamental for the individuation, the coincidence, the integration, and the ordering of events in time, but also for the feeling that time passes, that things exist for a while (duration), or that we can, at will, mentally travel to our vanished past and our not yet existing future. An epistemological difficulty stands in the way of understanding the status of 'time' in the neurosciences: temporalities emerge from the brain's perspective (the generator, actuator, and observer), not from the external observer. Yet, how neural circuits code, use, and represent temporal information is largely debated. I will discuss the role of neural rhythms from the basic feeling that time passes to the elicitation of, and the mental navigation in, temporal cognitive maps. [more]
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