In May, Nature Reviews Psychology published our paper “Connecting extinction learning in the laboratory and the wild.” It is a great honor that they also decided to highlight it on their website and to represent this topic on the cover of the May issue (https://www.nature.com/nrpsychol/)!

In extinction learning, a behaviour that was previously learned is extinguished when it no longer occurs in response to a target stimulus. However, laboratory research with non-human animals has revealed ‘paradoxes’ that consist of relapses or amplifications of the extinguished behaviour. 

The present observational study hypothesized that distinct profiles based on gaze behavior could be identified in humans and that these profiles would differ on addiction-related variables, such as alcohol consumption and impulsivity.

This review integrates animal and human evidence to examine how cue-triggered motivation and attention interact, and how these interactions are shaped by reward uncertainty, a dimension that has received limited interest in human research despite its robust effects in animals

Pigeons are powerful models for studying brain processes of learning and cognition. But up to now, researchers have lacked precise tools to investigate their brain activity in detail. Biopsychologists in Bochum are now changing that.

Große Freude im SFB 1280! Auf dem Foto zu sehen sind Onur Güntürkün und Dagmar Timmann, das Sprecherteam des Forschungsverbunds. Sie feiern die gute Nachricht: Der an der RUB angesiedelte Sonderforschungsbereich „Extinktionslernen“ erhält eine dritte Förderperiode.

Do birds feel and experience the world like us? Gianmarco Maldarelli and Onur Güntürkün draw together recent behavioral and neurobiological findings and show that birds display sensory awareness, signs of self-recognition, and even possess neural architectures that resemble those thought to support consciousness in humans.

Why do some birds fear new things while others seem endlessly curious? An international collaboration — the ManyBirds Project — brought together researchers from 77 institutions across 24 countries to explore this question.

The Unicum Foundation selected Onur Güntürkün as “Professor of the Year” from 600 nominees nationwide in five categories.

When: October 15th, 2025, at 15:00 s.t. | Where: ID 03/455 | Zoom: Meeting-ID 623 2641 0706, Password 650778