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

On Wednesday, June 4, 2025, Semih successfully defended his PhD thesis titled "From sensation to action: Visual processing and extinction learning in the pigeon forebrain".

Does anyone know how many people watch cat videos? Perhaps that's not even important. What is important is the research question: Onur Güntürkün and his team analyzed more than 400 cat clips on YouTube. Enviable! (Video abstract available)

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.