Ten years ago, biopsychologists from Bochum published a classic study by screening the entire scientific literature to run a cladographic analysis on the distribution of handedness in vertebrates. Back then, they could finally establish that asymmetries are not an exception but a widespread phenomenon.

Aversive emotions are primarily processed in the cortical right hemisphere. Now neurobiologists, neurologists, and biopsychologists from Bochum and the university clinic Essen discovered that the cerebellum evinces a left-sided prevalence in regions associated with emotion regulation and memory updating.

Subsea cables can emit strong electromagnetic fields and so disrupt magnetic field orientation of aquatic animals. But could they also disturb attending to information from other sensory modalities? 

Big team science has the potential to reshape comparative cognition research, but its implementation — especially in making fair comparisons between species, handling multisite variation and reaching researcher consensus — poses daunting challenges. In this paper, a group of authors propose solutions and discuss how big team science can transform the field.

The saying “context is everything”. Quotes, events, actions, or stimuli, cannot be viewed in isolation. They must be interpreted in the light of a bigger picture – their context. This is also evident in extinction learning where, in contextual renewal, an extinguished response reoccurs if the context is changed.

From March 31 to April 2, 2025, we had the pleasure of welcoming around 50 researchers from the SFB 1372 network to our Biopsychology Group at Ruhr University Bochum.

Incentive salience theory both explains the directional component of motivation (in terms of cue attraction or “wanting”) and its energetic component, as a function of the strength of cue attraction. This theory characterizes cue- and reward-triggered approach behavior.

In our daily lives, we encounter new objects from various categories through different sensory modalities, such as vision and touch. Yet, how learning new categories reshapes brain connectivity networks to adapt to these objects remains poorly understood.

Wir gratulieren unserer Kollegin Dr. Marlies Pinnow und ihrer Gruppe herzlich zur Preisverleihung des Awards #HREA!

When: December 13th, 2024, at 14 c.t. | Where: IB 4-115 | Zoom: Meeting-ID 666 1535 7896, Password 390776.

For further details, please click here.