The Göttingen Cognition Forum: Curiosity & Interaction

13 Oct 2025, 09:00 → 15 Oct 2025, 17:00 Europe/Berlin

Tagungszentrum Alte Mensa Göttingen

Aleksandra Bovt (IRTG 2172 PRoTECT), Alexander Gail (GAU-GEMI), Britta Korkowsky (UXGS), Christian Schloegl (SFB 1528 - Cognition of Interaction), Isabelle Matthias (CIDAS / Universität Göttingen), Rebecca Jürgens (UBPP)

We are pleased to announce the First Göttingen Cognition Forum:

Curiosity & Interaction

Social and physical interactions with the environment shape cognition in humans and non-human animals alike. Understanding these processes requires perspectives from multiple disciplines, including systems and computational neuroscience, behavioral biology, and psychology. To encourage interdisciplinary discussions and to bridge methodological and conceptual gaps between fields, the conference provides a platform for discussing neurocognitive mechanisms, psychological processes, and biological and evolutionary perspectives.

 

Participation is FREE OF CHARGE

 

Deadlines for registration:

• August 1, for abstract submissions (for oral presentations, poster or market place contributions)
• September 15th, for participation only

 

Confirmed Plenary speakers:

• Jacqueline Gottlieb (Columbia University): Learning, Memory, Decision-Making
• Bahador Bahrami (LMU Munich): Social Neuroscience, Decision-Making
• Judith Burkart (University of Zurich): Comparative Psychology, Cognitive Evolution, 
• Steve Chang (Yale University): Social Neuroscience, Social Behavior
• Nachum Ulanovsky (Weizmann Institute of Science): Neural Underpinnings of Natural Behavior
• Agostina Palmigiano (UC London): Computational Neuroscience

 

Empirical, theoretical, and computational approaches are equally valued, as are perspectives across the lifespan and insights from clinical research on neurodivergent and disabled populations. In addition, we particularly welcome contributions on methodological advances and artificial intelligence, including novel approaches for analyzing cognitive and behavioral processes.

The two-day main symposium will be followed by a one-day satellite symposium focusing on Computational Neuroscience.

We invite registrations for participation as well as submissions of abstracts for oral and poster presentations. For details on the thematic sessions and submission guidelines, please visit our Scientific Program and the Abstract Submission Portal.

We are committed to fostering an open, inclusive, and diversity-friendly environment where researchers from all backgrounds feel welcome. Our conference embraces a respectful and supportive atmosphere for all participants, regardless of career stage, discipline, or personal background. For more details, please refer to our Diversity Statement and Code of Conduct.

 

We look forward to welcoming you to Göttingen!

 

 

Organisers:

   

 

Sponsors:

 

We are grateful for the support of the University of Göttingen and the German Primate Center. 

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Monday 13 October

Registration

Registration will be possible in the entrance area of the Alte Mensa am Wilhelmsplatz

Plenaries

1 The Mystery and Significance of Curiosity for Brain and Behavior

Converging evidence suggests that animals are motivated by curiosity, the intrinsic desire to know, but little is known about the mechanisms of this process. I will discuss historical reasons for why curiosity has been neglected in cognitive science, and the crucial importance of this process for higher cognitive functions and ecological behavior beyond the narrow confines of the laboratory. I will describe a neurocomputational model of curiosity based on meta-level regulation of the fronto-parietal network by an executive circuit – and discuss how the model furthers our mechanistic understanding of curiosity in terms of behavior and neural activity.

Speaker: Jacqueline Gottlieb (Columbia University)

From curiosity to exploration

12:20 Lunch break

From curiosity to exploration

14:40 Coffee break

Plenaries

2 talk by Bahador Bahrami - title tba

Speaker: Bahador Bahrami (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)

From Exploration to Decision-Making

Poster session with wine and snacks

Tuesday 14 October

Plenaries

3 Marmosets - tuned for social interaction

Abstract to follow

Speaker: Judith Burkart (University of Zurich)

From Exploration to Decision-Making

11:20 Coffee break

From Decision-Making to Interaction

13:10 Lunch break

Plenaries

4 Cooperative strategies in marmoset dyads and their neural mechanisms

Cooperation in primate species relies on advanced social cognition, but the behavioral and neural mechanisms supporting cooperative behaviors remain unclear. To investigate this, we examined freely moving marmoset dyads in a cooperative lever-pulling task. Marmosets successfully coordinated their actions, relying on social vision rather than environmental cues. Causal dependencies between social gaze and pull actions revealed both gaze-dependent and gaze-independent strategies. Cooperation depended on social relationships, including dominance, kinship, and sex. Remarkably, marmosets adapted their strategies based on partner identity, indicating rapid social learning and memory. Building on decision neuroscience frameworks, we hypothesized that social gaze functions as a mechanism for accumulating social evidence prior to cooperative actions, supported by the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC). Using a wireless neural recording system in a naturalistic setting, we found enhanced social gaze before successful pull actions. Single-neuron analyses revealed that dmPFC firing rate slopes were modulated by gaze accumulation—shallower slopes occurred with more gaze accumulation, mirroring ramping patterns observed in decision-making studies. At the population level, dmPFC principal component trajectories were longer when more gaze accumulation was required, especially during mutual cooperation. These findings show that the dmPFC encodes accumulated social evidence through both neural and population dynamics, supporting a distributed mechanism for naturalistic social decision-making. Taken together, they provide new insights into the behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying cooperative interactions and underscore the importance of social gaze in coordinating real-world cooperation.

Speaker: Steve Chang (Yale University)

From Decision-Making to Interaction

16:30 Break

Market place and drinks

Plenaries

5 Neural codes for natural behaviors in bats

We study the neural basis of natural behaviors, in particular navigation and social behaviors – taking a “Natural Neuroscience” approach. In my talk I will discuss three recent studies: (1) Our recent discovery that in social groups, hippocampal neurons encode rich social signals – including the identities, sex, hierarchy, and affiliation of other individuals. (2) A coding-transformation that we discovered in the hippocampus of bats flying in a very long 200-meter tunnel – from sparse coding in hippocampal area CA3 to dense coding in area CA1. (3) Neuroscience in the wild: recordings of place cells and head-direction cells in bats navigating outdoors on a remote oceanic island near Zanzibar. These three studies demonstrate different levels of experimental control vs. ecological validity in our efforts to understand the neural basis of behavior and cognition.

Speaker: Nachum Ulanovsky (Weizmann Institute of Science)

Conference Dinner

Wednesday 15 October

Plenaries

6 Theory of responses to holographic optogenetics in recurrent circuits

The cerebral cortex exhibits strong recurrent connectivity governed by complex wiring rules. Recent advances allow probing this circuitry through optogenetic perturbations of single or few neurons, yet a general theory linking these responses to underlying connectivity is lacking. Here, we develop an exactly solvable framework to predict responses to perturbations in networks with multiple cell types and space- and feature-dependent connectivity. Analysis of these equations reveals simple rules that govern perturbation response patterns. Comparison with experimental data imposes new constraints on the connectivity parameters and enables predictions of the responses of unmeasured cell types and novel experimental conditions.

Speaker: Agostina Palmigiano (University College London)

Neural Interfaces

11:20 Coffee break

Cognition, Circuits and Cells

13:10 lunch break

Neural Circuit Evolution