December 9, 2025: Verena published her third preprint from her medical doctoral thesis! She investigated neurobiological and computational mechanisms underlying altered language-related predictive processing and subclinical symptom formation. 👏💡
October 26, 2025: Elisabeth published the preprint for our Munich Sentence (MuSe) Database – an interactive data base for sentence stimuli with audio-recordings and linguistic features! 🗯️🎉
October 10, 2025: Very happy to welcome Bruna Carvalho into the lab! She is a PhD student co-supervised by Dr Gerard Derosiere. Welcome, Bruna! 🧠 🤗
October 3, 2025: We had a fantastic lab visit from James Kesby with lots of science and a few good Bavarian socials!🤓🥨
September 4, 2025: Very happy to announce that Miriam Langerbeck is joining the lab as a PhD student. Welcome, Miriam, enjoy the ride 🧠 🤗
July 19, 2025: Elisabeth’s first full first-author paper is out in Schizophrenia, exploring temporal stability of semantic predictions in individuals with schizotypic and autistic traits 🎉👏
July 14-17, 2025: We very successfully attended CPC in Tübingen. Onur, Pritha and Zach presented posters, Elisabeth and Franziska had talks. It was very intense, and amazing – lots of new input, ideas for projects and fun!! 🤓🎷🧠
July 10, 2025: Pritha’s paper on model-based and model-free prediction error processing in OCD using computational modelling and neuro-imaging is finally (!!!!!) out in NeuroImage! This was quite a ride – but worth it! 🥂🤩
June 24, 2025: Franziska presented at the ICHR in Nashville, hosted by the amazing Sohee Park, and celebrated with Al, Ben, Peter and Elvis 🎸🕺🏻
June 20, 2025: Elisabeth presented our Munich Sentence Database MuSe, a German sentence corpus with audio-recording and cloze measures at PUG@Wuerzburg. The corpus can be accessed via OSF.
June 19, 2025: Elisabeth co-chaired a symposium at PUG@Wuerzburg together with Anna-Lena Eckert, Andreea Diaconescu, Ryan Smith and Riccardo Maramotti.
June 17, 2025: Franziska gave an invited talk at the annual meeting of the TRUSTING EU Project, Wolfram Hinzen, Iris Sommer and more! What a great meeting!💡🧠
May 15, 2025: Katharina has joined the lab and will be working on the longitudinal schizophrenia patient study. Welcome!!!👋
April 3, 2025: Congratulations to Elisabeth for winning the Early Career Award at the Discourse Meeting 2025! 🎉👏
April 2, 2025: Elisabeth and Franziska attended SIRS 2025. They gave a fantastic symposium on Computational Approaches to Understanding Language Alterations in Psychosis together with Kelly Diederen (King’s College London), Matt Nour (Oxford University), Xinyi Liang (King’s College London) and Lena Palaniyappan (McGill University). 🧠🗣️
March 9, 2025: Elisabeth published a preprint together with Andrea Greve from Cambridge University showing that semantic predictions are less stable in individuals with increasing schizotypal and autistic traits, importantly those alterations are not explained by memory differences!💡🎉
February 18, 2025: Finally out in NeuroImage: Clinical – Pritha’s second paper on reward anticipation in children and young adolescents with psychotic-like experiences! 🧠🤩
January 19, 2025: We kicked off the year with our traditional potluck dinner, bringing together our lab with the Theory of Quantum Matter group. It was great fun and absolutely lots of amazing food!😋🎉
December 19, 2024: We went on a little pre-holiday excursion – watching solar storms at the ESO, testing the slides in the Mathematics building and enjoying some mules wine. It was lovely! 🎄🌅🚀
December 12, 2024: We are celebrating the end of Julia’s data collection of 60 participants for her thesis 🎉🤩
November 28-29, 2024: Elisabeth and Franziska visited Thomas Lachmann and the Center of Cognitive Science at the RPTU in Kaiserslautern. Their talks were very well received and they had some fantastic discussions. Super nice and welcoming institute! It was great fun! 😊🧠
November 22, 2024: Pritha’s first paper on decision-making in a transdiagnostic involving individuals with schizophrenia, OCD or MDD has been published in the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience! 🤩
November 14, 2024: Franziska, Elisabeth and Verena have finally published a preprint for their novel Predictive Language Task. They found that semantic priors are overweighted in individuals with schizotypy, and linked to cortical glutamatergic alterations, possibly explaining non-clinical hallucinations. This paper provides insights into the computational and neurobiological mechanisms underlying psychotic symptoms. Also see 🧵on X! 🎉🧠
October 15, 2024: Kevin Agboka joined the lab to pursue his medical thesis on investigating the cortical metabolic profile of individuals with high schizotypy. Welcome! 👋
October 5, 2024: Pritha and Franziska posted their next preprint on neural signature of reward anticipations in children at risk for psychosis 🎉
September 19, 2024: Isabella Goodwin, Uni of Melbourne, visited us to discuss some Bayesian inference during perceptual decision making and give an excellent presentation. It was great fun! 🧠👏
September 1, 2024: Franziska published a paper in scientific reports on cognitive subgroups in early psychosis, showing that the groups differed not only in cognitive abilities, but also in medication and brain structure.
July 24, 2024: Pritha and Franziska posted their next preprint on altered prefrontal prediction error signals in OCD. 👏
June 17 – 25, 2024: Elisabeth, Zach and Franziska visited Dr James Kesby at the Queensland Brain Institute, and held a translation workshop together on reconciling research methods and results for clinical and preclinical psychosis research.
June 13, 2024: Franziska gave a talk on Alteration in predictive language processing in different stages of psychosis at the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, chaired by Prof. Marta Garrido.
June 7, 2024: Franziska received her Habilitation after giving a talk on Neurobiology of Language. 🍾🎉
May 31, 2024: Elisabeth and Franziska attended the PuG in Hamburg, and organised a great symposium with Charline Peylo, Anna-Lena Eckert and Joost Haarsma on Perception under Uncertainty. 🧠🥳
April 25, 2024: Verena published her second paper, which investigates the impact of spectral basis sets during MRS analyses on metabolite concentrations! Great work!! 🤩🍾
April 15, 2024: Very happy to announce that Onur Icin joined the lab as a PhD student to investigate structural and functional brain alteration across the schizophrenia spectrum and associate those with cognitive changes! Welcome!!🎉
April 10, 2024: Franziska received a second DFG grant to investigate acoustic hallucinations and how they impact our memory using behavioural testing, computational modelling & EEG. 🎉🧠
April 3-7, 2024: Elisabeth, Franziska, Pritha and Verena attended the SIRS 2024 in Florence, presenting recent work in four posters. There were two-hour long discussions, and many ideas for new projects and collaborations! 🤩👏
April 3-7, 2024, cont.: …and of course, we enjoyed Florence!!! 🍹🍕
March 17-20, 2024: The entire lab attended the TeaP 2024 in Regensburg. We contributed one symposium with two talks, two individual talks and one poster! Well done, everyone!👏
March 17-20, 2024, cont.: We also very much enjoyed the social side of things! 🥳🏃♀️
March 5, 2024: Elisabeth received funding from the Marianne Plehn Programm to start a position at the Department of Psychology at the LMU. 🥂🤩
February 29, 2024: Franziska received a DFG grant to investigate predictive language processing in individuals with psychosis using fMRI & EEG. 🎉🧠
January 24, 2024: Franziska received a grant by the Bayrische Forschungsallianz to initiate a collaboration with Dr James Kesby on computational and translational investigations of decision making in psychosis: bridging the disciplinary and species gaps. 🥂🐨
December 12, 2023: Pritha and Franziska published their first pre-print together, investigating model-based and model-free decision making in a transdiagnostic sample! 🎉🤞
October 16, 2023: Enjoying dinner & drinks in Maxvorstadt! 🍹😄
October 1, 2023: Zach Tefertiller joined the lab as a PhD student to develop a cognitive battery and computational analysis tool to predict psychiatric diseases such as psychosis. Welcome!!🎉
September 15, 2023: Julia Kohler joined the lab as a MD of science student to investigate the neural signatures of conditioned hallucinations. Welcome!!🎉
September 10, 2023: Elisabeth was awarded the prestigious Studienstiftungs-Scholarship. What an amazing achievement! Well done! 🎉💐
August 30, 2023: Congratulations to Alexia Pagkopoulou, Simiao Xu and Lea Zaric for submitting their Bachelor and Master Theses over the summer. Well done everyone! 🤩🥂
August 7, 2023: Verena’s first paper has been published in Scientific Reports showing levels of cortical glutamate increasing with stronger psychotic-like experiences but not autistic traits. 🎉☺️
August 2, 2023: Elisabeth gave a fantastic talk at this summer’s NeuroCamp Summerschool Munich on using predictive coding to understand psychosis. 👏🤩
July 20, 2020: Franziska gave a talk on ‘The experimental evidence of the predictive coding account of psychosis’ in Tommy Sprague’s Lab at the UC Santa Barbara (amazing place!!)
July 18, 2023: We are very happy to announce that Verena published her second pre-print on the impact of basis set composition for the analysis of glutamate concentrations from MR spectroscopy data. 🥂🎉
July 12, 2023: Congrats to Viola for finishing her Bachelor Thesis on the reward anticipation in children at risk for psychosis! Well done!👏
July 10, 2023: Lab outing on a lovely summer evening 🍕+🍹=😌
June 8, 2023: Kathrin Koch and Franziska published an article in npj parkinson’s disease on similarities in morphometric grey matter networks between early schizophrenia/psychosis and Parkinson’s psychosis 🥂☺️
May 22, 2023: Congratulations to Elisabeth and Pritha who both were accepted as graduate students into the Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences, LMU 🎉👍
May 10-15, 2023: At the SIRS in Toronto, Kelly Diederen (KCL) and Franziska chaired two symposia on the same day. The first one was on Alterations in Learning and Decision Making as Candidate Biomarkers for psychosis: Investigating Transdiagnostic Sample to Identify Psychosis-Specific Alterations with speakers being Adam Culbreth and James Gold in addition to Kelly and Franziska, and Veith Weilnhammer as discussant. We had great discussions!
The second symposium was on a timely question: Are psychotic symptoms linked to an overweighting of prior knowledge or of sensory information: Is there a consensus? with speakers being Marta Garrido and Veith Weilnhammer in addition to Kelly and Franziska, and Emily Hird as discussant. The feedback was very positive!
March 27, 2023: At the TeaP 2023 in Trier, we gave a super-well attended symposium together with Kelly Diederen (KCL) on Computational Psychiatry: Identifying the fine-grained behavioural mechanism underpinning symptoms in psychosis and internalising disorders. We enjoyed it very much!
March 16, 2023: Welcome, Alexia Pagkopoulou, who joined the lab as a Bachelor Student. 😀
February 23, 2023: Welcome, Viola von Heyden, who joined the lab as a Bachelor Student! 😊
February 21, 2023: Elisabeth’s active inference paper got published in the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience. 🥂
February 18, 2023: Lea Zaric has joined the lab as a Master Student! Welcome 🎉👍
February 3, 2023: Verena published her first pre-print on the associations between ACC glutamate and psychotic-like symptoms. 👏🎉
January 27, 2023: Simiao Xu has joined the lab as a Master Student! Welcome 😊🎊
December 15, 2022: Franziska has been awarded a position as a GSN associate member to the faculty of the Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences.
December 1, 2022: Congratulations to Verena who received the Leonhard-Lorenz Grant. 🎉🥂 Well done!!!
November 23-26, 2022, continued: At the DGPPN, Elisabeth gave a presentation on action selection in psychosis (upper left), Pritha talked about model free and model based decision making in OCD (upper right), Franziska reviewed findings on reward and salience processing in psychosis (lower left) and Sarah presented data on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the increase of schizotypal traits in the general population (lower right).
November 23-26, 2022, continued: During the DGPPN, we even squeezed in a little Berlin-sightseeing run 🏃♀️🏃♀️🏃♀️ Really nice! 😊
November 23-26, 2022: We are attending the DGPPN. Very interesting and cool inspirations for future projects!
September 1, 2022: Elisabeth Sterner and Pritha Sen have joined the lab as PhD students. Welcome!!
August 31, and September 6, 2022: Congratulations to Elisabeth Sterner and Madeleine Seitz for submitting their master thesis!! Well done 👍 🥂
August 16, 2022: Congratulations to Pritha Sen for submitting her master thesis!! Well done 👏🎉
August 3, 2022: Katharina Bracherand Franziska Knolle submit preprint on clustering cognitive phenotypes in affective and non-affective psychosis (medRxiv) . 🎊🥂.
July 25, 2022: Felix Brandl and Franziska Knolle publish paper in Brain, on negative symptoms, striatal dopamine and modle-free decision making in schizophrenia.
July 18, 2022: Congratulations to Clara Seifert who submitted her master thesis! 🎊🥂
July 4, 2022: Sarah Daimer publishes her next paper on COVID-19 & use of media & schizotypy in eLife. The paper is also presented in a eLife Digest. Congratulations!
May 16, 2022: Elisabeth Sterner and Franziska Knolle publish a preprint on decision making in early psychosis using active inference modelling. Finally 😅 (Well deserved submission cake!)
May 7, 2022: Franziska Knolle and Kathrin Koch publish a preprint investigating morphometric grey matter networks in a multi-centre study. Great project with great collaborators!
May 31, 2022: Drinks after work …. work hard, play hard 🤔
April 1, 2022: Verena Demler joins the lab as an MD student. Welcome!
February 22, 2022: Clara Seifert, Elisabeth Sterner, Madeleine Seitz and Pritha Sen join the lab to write their Master’s theses. Welcome!
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