Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin

Increased firing rates monotonically expand neuronal coding bandwidth

Sensory information is often processed by populations of neurons that vary with respect to their levels of spiking activity. It appears plausible that neurons that fire more often are capable of following faster changes in the input signal than those with lower firing rates. In t...

Signals of Communicative Intent Enhance the Impact of Emotional Messages from Human Speakers, While Effects for Robots are Attenuated

Abstract The present work investigated humans’ responses to robots’ verbal emotional expressions. To this end, the interplay of agent characteristics and signals of communicative intent on emotional word processing was examined. In two behavioral studies (N1 = 36, N2 = 72), parti...

Social information quality and environmental volatility shape collective foraging behaviour

Abstract Collective foraging is widespread across the animal kingdom, allowing animals to more effectively discover resources. However, collective foragers need to balance a key trade-off between private exploration and using social information. Social information can come in ver...

The Molecular Architecture of Somatic Spines of the Lateral Septum

ABSTRACT The lateral septum is a key subcortical structure and has been implicated in social memory. One aspect of social memory, the ability to recognize relatives, is conserved across vertebrate species and reflected in stable, lifelong memories. Synapses are considered to be t...

Task-irrelevant stimuli robustly drive phasic pupil-linked arousal but only weakly affect memory formation

Abstract Brainstem arousal systems including the locus coeruleus noradrenaline system, respond transiently to behaviorally relevant events. This also drives dilations of the pupil, which are often observed during cognitive tasks. The strength of pupil responses during encoding of...

Evaluating clinical and neuroimaging predictors for cognitive-behavioral therapy outcome in obsessive-compulsive disorder

Abstract Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is the first-line treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), yet a significant number of patients do not achieve remission or substantial symptom relief. This study aims to enhance the prediction of CBT outcomes in OCD by integr...