Neda Shahidi
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nedash.bsky.social
Neda Shahidi
@nedash.bsky.social
head of the Embodied Cognition Group (ECG) at the University of Goettingen
Our summer Erasmus student, Evangelos, wrote this about his summer internship experience with us. I am very happy that you achieved both a professional and a personal milestone, Evan! www.linkedin.com/posts/evange...
Reflecting on the past months, I feel truly grateful for the chance to spend 4 months in Göttingen, Germany, in yet another Erasmus program as an intern at the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Deutsches…...
Reflecting on the past months, I feel truly grateful for the chance to spend 4 months in Göttingen, Germany, in yet another Erasmus program as an intern at the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Deutsches ...
www.linkedin.com
September 24, 2025 at 12:19 PM
That’s how you know he is a baby of academics: Ewan has a pediatrician visit next week and just started to do new developmental skills! Deadline driven like the rest of us 😁
June 4, 2025 at 10:35 AM
I have an open position for an M.Sc. thesis, with the potential to continue into a paid PhD. If you know machine learning and are interested in naturalistic decision making in primates, email me a CV: www.uni-goettingen.de/de/embodied+...
Embodied Cognition Group - Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Webseiten der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
www.uni-goettingen.de
May 9, 2025 at 2:41 PM
A paper from my first postdoc is now out in PLOS Computational Biology. There, I have compared three probabilistic models of response suppression: subtraction, division, and negative feedback, for salamander, mouse, and marmoset retinal ganglion cells. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
May 9, 2025 at 2:32 PM
From April: We had a poster at the primate neurobiology meeting where Sara presented a side-by-side comparison of vigilance in macaques in the lab and the field. It's interesting to see how naturalistic our naturalistic experiments are! This is a shared project with Julia Ostner's group at the DPZ.
PNM-2025 | DPZ
You are here:
www.dpz.eu
May 9, 2025 at 2:31 PM
I have been back at work this week (although I never really left work!) after my son Ewan was born last December. He is a sweet and smiley little boy. I couldn't have asked for better.
May 9, 2025 at 2:28 PM
This week, René will present a poster of one of our floor foraging projects at a foraging conference in Lyon, France. Check out the program here: sites.google.com/view/foragin...
Foraging conference - Programme
[ 11 to 13, December 2024 ]
sites.google.com
December 9, 2024 at 6:48 PM
From last week: René successfully finished his M.Sc. thesis. Together with Fabian Sinz and me, René developed a model to reconstruct the spiking activity of a population of neurons and tested it on neurons in the frontoparietal reach network (Data: courtesy of Alex Gail). Way to go, René!
November 18, 2024 at 10:28 AM
From October 1st: Welcome Numa Koudsie to ECG as a new research assistant. Numa will work on a neural network model to predict foraging success in a group of lemurs. This is a collaboration with Claudia Fichtel at the Behavioral Ecology Dept. (DPZ) and Fabian Sinz at the Data Science Dept. (UGOE)
October 17, 2024 at 12:52 PM
check out the article that Ayuno Nakahashi and I wrote for DPZ aktuell (page 25) about our experience at the Pint of Science, Göttingen. Too bad I missed Ayuno's cool experiment. www.dpz.eu/fileadmin/co...
www.dpz.eu
October 17, 2024 at 12:47 PM
from Sept 3rd: Thank you Tatyana Sharpee for visiting us in Goe on a short notice and giving a talk on using hyperbolic geometry to understand biological systems. We couldn't arrange online broadcasting of Tatyana's talk, but checkout this relevant publication: meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR2...
APS -APS March Meeting 2024 - Event - Hyperbolic geometry and information acquisition in biological systems
meetings.aps.org
September 11, 2024 at 12:40 PM
Wishing Hannah Lüschen, a member of ECG, the best for her next career step in one of the neuroscience M.Sc. programs that she has been accepted for. 🥳 Stay awesome Hannah! 🤩 Never change!
July 10, 2024 at 9:52 AM
Many thanks to my colleague at the University of Konstanz and MPI, specially Ahmed El Hadi, for the great scientific exchange (still going on). Details about my yesterday's talk at www.exc.uni-konstanz.de/collective-b... (and I believe a recording will be available on youtube later)
CASCB Talk: “Learning a guess from a guess”, foraging macaques adjust to the environment’s temporal and spatial structure by Neda Shahidi
www.exc.uni-konstanz.de
June 25, 2024 at 8:19 AM
We discussed Fan et al., Neuron, 2024 in ECG jclub, led by Hannah: gazes with social context (eyes or face of another monkey) are causally controlled by orbitofrontal cortex in macaques. The gaze following seems to be controlled by dmPFC. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38187638/
June 18, 2024 at 1:52 PM
From March 2024: we discussed Hung et al in ECG jclub, led by Sara: The study fund a decrease in the number of microsaccades, linked to adaptation and learning in the visual system www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Visual perceptual learning modulates microsaccade rate and directionality - Scientific Reports
Scientific Reports - Visual perceptual learning modulates microsaccade rate and directionality
www.nature.com
May 31, 2024 at 11:54 AM
From April, 2024: We discussed Arseneau-Robar et. al. in ECG j club, led by Kacper: monkeys adapt their foraging based on experience and social context. Monkeys performed a foraging task with preferred and less less preferred food, competing with another monkey www.frontiersin.org/articles/10....
Think Fast!: Vervet Monkeys Assess the Risk of Being Displaced by a Dominant Competitor When Making Foraging Decisions
Foraging animals need to quickly assess the costs and benefits of different foraging decisions, including resource quantity, quality, preference, ease of access, dispersion, distance, and predation ri...
www.frontiersin.org
May 31, 2024 at 11:43 AM
We discussed Cowley et al, in ECG journal club, led by Sara. They turned off neurons in Lobula columnar, one by one, then, trained ANNs to map artificial and real LC neurons, then predicted ANN's response to a wide range of visual inputs to infer tuning of each neuron www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Mapping model units to visual neurons reveals population code for social behaviour - Nature
A deep neural network with ‘knockout training’ is used to model sensorimotor transformations and neural perturbations of male Drosophila melanogaster during visually guided social behaviour and p...
www.nature.com
May 31, 2024 at 11:37 AM
Reposted by Neda Shahidi
Next week it is again "Pint of Science" Week, and we will be represented by Ayuno Nakahashi (@ayuno-n.bsky.social) and Neda Shahidi (@nedash.bsky.social). Looking forward to the talks at the Duke Pub and a cold brew 🍻. Cheers!

pintofscience.de/events/goett...
Goettingen
Explore Pint of Science Germany events in Goettingen
pintofscience.de
May 7, 2024 at 1:25 PM
We will offer a workshop on observational learning at Intl. Conf. in Development and Learning. Here are the details: www.uni-goettingen.de/de/687263.html Looking forward to be back in Austin, my second hometown
Learning by Watching - Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Webseiten der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
www.uni-goettingen.de
May 7, 2024 at 7:42 PM
Read the interview of DPZ Aktuell with me about science, life, cats, and everything else here: www.dpz.eu/fileadmin/co...
www.dpz.eu
May 3, 2024 at 11:53 AM
hbr.org/2018/03/crea... In a growth culture, people build their capacity to see through blind spots; acknowledge insecurities and shortcomings rather than unconsciously acting them out …How people feel — and make other people feel — becomes as important as how much they know.
March 16, 2024 at 7:11 AM
My new paper in Nature Neuroscience, based on a free foraging experiment I conducted during my PhD. Macaques self-pace actions for a better chance of reward, and we decoded their subjective belief of reward, leading to actions, from dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex www.nature.com/articles/s41...
March 5, 2024 at 3:15 PM
Artificial intelligence in primate research, a talk by my colleague Richard (in German) : www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rUh...
January 25, 2024 at 4:58 PM
The days are going to get longer in the north hemisphere for the next six months. Happy Yalda, the sun’s birthday 🌞
December 22, 2023 at 9:11 AM