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Monika Schönauer

@mschoenauer

Assistant professor @UniFreiburg interested in memory consolidation, sleep, reactivation. Head of the Imaging Memory and Consolidation Lab. Emmy Noether Research Group Leader "The Developing Engram." She/her. http://imagingconsolidation.com/

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Latest posts by Monika Schönauer @mschoenauer

Isrw group photo

Isrw group photo

Still pumped up from yesterday's international sleep replay workshop! Provocative talks, engaging discussion groups & enthusiastic engagement by all attendees from undergrads to full professors. Stay tuned for info on the next one. And now, on to @cnsmtg.bsky.social. Check out our lab's posters!

07.03.2026 17:12 👍 22 🔁 6 💬 0 📌 1
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Episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz Nature Human Behaviour - Biba et al. show that episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz.

I am excited to share my first paper, showing that episodic memory formation is theta rhythmic, is now published in Nature Human Behavior! Check it out here: rdcu.be/e6pzS. Thanks to my PI, Katherine Duncan, and to my collaborators for their support on this journey! Stay tuned for iEEG follow up 🧠

02.03.2026 19:28 👍 103 🔁 43 💬 3 📌 3
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Episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz Nature Human Behaviour, Published online: 02 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41562-026-02416-5Biba et al. show that episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz.

Episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz

02.03.2026 19:47 👍 51 🔁 17 💬 0 📌 2
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Human hippocampal theta–gamma coupling coordinates sequential planning during navigation

Impressive study from Dan Bush's Lab at UCL:

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

02.03.2026 16:52 👍 77 🔁 26 💬 2 📌 1
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Sleep spindles promote hippocampal network downregulation during sleep Sleep is thought to globally downregulate neuronal network activity and synaptic connections enhanced during prior wakefulness and, in parallel, to up…

@currentbiology.bsky.social
I am very happy to share our latest paper, just published in @currentbiology.bsky.social! In collaboration with Olga Garaschuk's lab, we used in vivo 2P calcium imaging to investigate the role of sleep spindles in the hippocampus. 🧠💤
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

02.03.2026 09:08 👍 25 🔁 9 💬 1 📌 0
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Why You Can’t Remember Being a Toddler This form of amnesia is almost universal, but has long been overlooked.

Why can't you remember being a toddler? Or can you?

Nice feature in Time of our lab's work on infantile amnesia at @tcddublin.bsky.social

Also of the labs of @sarahdpower.bsky.social at MPI Berlin, @franklandlab.bsky.social at Sick Kids, and Nick Turk-Browne at Yale.

time.com/7380496/why-...

25.02.2026 08:31 👍 36 🔁 17 💬 2 📌 1
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"You see what you look for, and you look for what you know."

We are proud to release FOCUS: a 100 μm deformable human subcortical atlas precisely registered to MNI space.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

20.02.2026 12:28 👍 86 🔁 39 💬 4 📌 1
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New paper alert! 🚨

We found that the brain's compass is remarkably stable at two scales

1️⃣ the system maintains its internal organization for weeks
2️⃣ It "remembers" its orientation for weeks, even after a single visit

This may be key to how the brain aligns its other maps.

Paper: rdcu.be/e3waP

11.02.2026 17:52 👍 199 🔁 69 💬 5 📌 7
MEEP – Heidelberg Summer School on Memory and Sleep Join our 4-day summer school on memory consolidation, neural replay, and sleep. May 31–June 3, 2026 in Heidelberg. For Master, PhD students & postdocs.

Save the date for the 1st MEEP – Heidelberg Summer School on Memory and Sleep: May 31st to June 3rd
Keynote speakers: @marwimber.bsky.social @mgarvert.bsky.social & Dan Bendor
Sessions on:
memory processes
sleep & replay
analysis and stimulation techniques
www.zi-mannheim.de/forschung/ab...

plz rp

12.02.2026 10:48 👍 23 🔁 14 💬 3 📌 2
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02403-w

Excited to share a new paper spearheaded by the wonderful @baror-shira.bsky.social:
tinyurl.com/bd8xdcum
@erc.europa.eu @nathumbehav.nature.com

We test the link between serial dependence (as an index of continuity) and event boundaries (indexing segmentation). A few key findings in the thread:

11.02.2026 14:49 👍 49 🔁 26 💬 1 📌 2
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Building compositional tasks with shared neural subspaces Nature - The brain can flexibly perform multiple tasks by compositionally combining task-relevant neural representations.

Thrilled that my paper is out in the @nature.com. We explored how the brain builds complex tasks by compositionally combining simpler sub-task representations. The brain flexibly performs multiple tasks by dynamically reusing neural subspaces for sensory inputs and motor actions

rdcu.be/eRVUk

11.02.2026 22:40 👍 130 🔁 47 💬 4 📌 1
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"..hippocampal-prefrontal systems represent emotion concepts in a map-like way at multiple levels of abstraction.."

Map-like representations of emotion knowledge in hippocampal-prefrontal systems
by
@yumengma.bsky.social and @pkragel.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

09.02.2026 09:35 👍 41 🔁 13 💬 0 📌 0
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Lesions Causing Aphantasia are Connected to the Fusiform Imagery Node The absence of visual mental imagery, called aphantasia, occurs congenitally in up to 3% of the general population, but the brain regions responsible for aphantasia remain uncertain. Rare cases of acq...

Happy to be part of this new paper analyzing lesion-induced aphantasia, now accepted in Cortex. One more reason to believe that the Fusiform Imagery Node is important for the conscious experience of mental imagery. Here: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1....

30.01.2026 14:04 👍 61 🔁 19 💬 1 📌 0
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📣 Please spread: we’re hiring a Lab Manager! It is a critical position in our new lab. As our lab moves to Barcelona and joins the @crg.eu, we’re looking for a Lab Manager to help build the lab and set the lab atmosphere.
🔗 Apply here 👉 recruitment.crg.eu/content/jobs...

23.01.2026 06:41 👍 89 🔁 94 💬 2 📌 3
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A unifying account of replay as context-driven memory reactivation A context-driven memory model simulates a wide range of characteristics of waking and sleeping hippocampal replay, providing a new account of how and why replay occurs.

Really thrilled that this paper led by @neurozz.bsky.social is now published in its final version in @elife.bsky.social!!

This is a memory-focused (as opposed to RL-focused) account of the detailed characteristics of forward and backward awake and sleep replay!

elifesciences.org/articles/99931

15.01.2026 13:57 👍 140 🔁 53 💬 3 📌 1
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It’s All In The Journey: Putative Strategies Extracted from Navigation Paths Predict Spatial Memory and Hippocampal Recruitment Navigation in the real world may rely on a multitude of different strategies with distinct advantages and disadvantages. However, the characterization of spontaneous strategy use during wayfinding and...

Our new work on human navigation strategies and related neural correlates is out! Thanks to Nikolai Axmacher, @lukaskunz.bsky.social and others in the team for a great opportunity to look at this dataset of iEEG and fMRI. doi.org/10.64898/202... code: github.com/zits69/Arena

09.01.2026 21:55 👍 13 🔁 9 💬 0 📌 0
ICOM7, International Conference on Memory. 26th-30th July 2027. Glasgow, Scottish Exhibition & Conference Centre (SEC)

ICOM7, International Conference on Memory. 26th-30th July 2027. Glasgow, Scottish Exhibition & Conference Centre (SEC)

Save the date for ICOM-7 (aka the Memory Olympics)

12.01.2026 21:08 👍 23 🔁 14 💬 0 📌 1
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Professur (W3) für Pädagogische Psychologie - Universität Bielefeld Universität Bielefeld bietet Stelle als Professur (W3) für Pädagogische Psychologie in Bielefeld - jetzt bewerben!

Bei uns ist die eine W3 Päd. Psychologie zu besetzen ! jobs.zeit.de/jobs/profess...

01.01.2026 15:41 👍 3 🔁 8 💬 0 📌 0

We are hiring postdocs to work on representational drift and network dynamics (ERC-funded project using calcium imaging /neuropixels). If you are interested, please get in touch!

Here is the link to the official job ad:
www.uni-saarland.de/fileadmin/up...

19.12.2025 14:50 👍 4 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
Dr. Till Roenneberg - chronotypes and social jetlag. Performance Around The Clock episode 27.
Dr. Till Roenneberg - chronotypes and social jetlag. Performance Around The Clock episode 27. YouTube video by Performance Around the Clock w Dr. Satchin Panda

Dr. Till Roenneberg - chronotypes and social jetlag. Performance Around The Clock episode 27.
[January 2025]
youtu.be/pn3hpOsUT9I?...

16.12.2025 12:36 👍 5 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
OSF

New preprint w/ Malin Styrnal & @martinhebart.bsky.social

Have you ever computed noise ceilings to understand how well a model performs? We wrote a clarifying note on a subtle and common misapplication that can make models appear quite a lot better than they are.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

04.12.2025 18:53 👍 60 🔁 23 💬 1 📌 4

I'm happy to share my debut as first-author with the recent publication of our article in #JNeurosci:

www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

Big thanks again to @tschreiner.bsky.social and the whole team who made this possible! 🧠🌬️

04.12.2025 08:09 👍 36 🔁 17 💬 0 📌 1
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Respiratory coordination of excitability states across the human wake-sleep cycle While the respiratory rhythm is increasingly recognized as a key modulator of oscillatory brain activity across the wake-sleep cycle in humans, very l…

Our paper on respiratory modulation of excitability during sleep is now online!

Open access link:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

First of hopefully many collabs with the @tschreiner.bsky.social Lab and led by @asanchezcorzo.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

04.12.2025 15:38 👍 40 🔁 13 💬 1 📌 1
Sleep pressure and slow-wave-rich NREM sleep exert distinct effects on cerebral vasomotion and on brain pulsations driven by respiratory and cardiac forces. Heightened sleep pressure (following 35 h of wakefulness) promotes vasomotion (yellow box). Slow-wave-rich NREM sleep enhances brain pulsations driven by the respiratory and cardiac cycles—more so in gray and white matter than in the ventricles (red boxes). The respiration- and cardiac-driven brain pulsations also intensify with deeper sleep (N3 > N2) and correlate with EEG delta power, which is a measure of slow-wave activity (light vs. dark red boxes).

Sleep pressure and slow-wave-rich NREM sleep exert distinct effects on cerebral vasomotion and on brain pulsations driven by respiratory and cardiac forces. Heightened sleep pressure (following 35 h of wakefulness) promotes vasomotion (yellow box). Slow-wave-rich NREM sleep enhances brain pulsations driven by the respiratory and cardiac cycles—more so in gray and white matter than in the ventricles (red boxes). The respiration- and cardiac-driven brain pulsations also intensify with deeper sleep (N3 > N2) and correlate with EEG delta power, which is a measure of slow-wave activity (light vs. dark red boxes).

Sleep supports brain health partly by regulating fluid dynamics to clear waste. @ulvlarsen.bsky.social &co probe the relation between #sleep & fluid movement in the human #brain, finding that #SleepPressure & intensity have distinct effects on brain pulsations @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/3XQWCL6

25.11.2025 17:40 👍 28 🔁 9 💬 1 📌 1
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New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Inès de Riedmatten, Ileana O. Jelescu, et al:

Evaluating the dependence of ADC-fMRI on haemodynamics in breath-hold and resting-state conditions

doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

21.11.2025 03:48 👍 4 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
DGPs - Tagungen und Veranstaltungen Die Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie e.V. (DGPs) ist eine Vereinigung der in Forschung und Lehre tätigen Psychologen und Psychologinnen. Die DGPs erstrebt die Förderung und Verbreitung der wissen...

Biopsychologie meets Entwicklungspsychologie!

Die #DGPs-Fachgruppe Biologische Psychologie & Neuropsychologie lädt zum virtuellen Kolloquium ein:

shorturl.at/3FPSU

Am 21.11.2025 spricht Dr. Markus Werkle-Bergner (@markuswb.bsky.social).

Wir freuen uns auf fachgruppenübergreifenden Austausch!

18.11.2025 16:54 👍 8 🔁 5 💬 0 📌 0

Excited to present our recent work on how sequential coupling of sleep oscillations enables concept-neuron reactivation and supports information flow across the human hippocampal–cortical circuit. #SFN2025 Board NN12 Nov 19 8 AM–12 PM #sleep #memory #HumanSingleNeuron
Schreiner Lab x Mormann Lab

19.11.2025 06:46 👍 10 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 1

At #SFN2025? Into sleep, brain rhythms, or single-unit–based memory reactivation? Then you absolutely should check out @fabian31415.bsky.social's poster. I might be biased, but this is some truly awesome work.
#neurosky #neuroskyence

19.11.2025 07:40 👍 12 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 0
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Congrats @sjo09.bsky.social! Your trailblazing engram discoveries are unforgettable. So happy that the Peter Seeburg Integrative Neuroscience Prize is honoring YOUR Era's tour @sfn.org.

17.11.2025 07:17 👍 32 🔁 4 💬 2 📌 0
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Disrupted Sleep: Mechanisms Linking Sleep Deprivation, Neurovascular Dysfunction, and Metabolic Pathways at Leeds Beckett University on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - Disrupted Sleep: Mechanisms Linking Sleep Deprivation, Neurovascular Dysfunction, and Metabolic Pathways at Leeds Beckett University, listed on FindAPhD.com

Please repost! Fully funded four-year PhD studentship opportunity on sleep deprivation and neurovascular dysfunction on the BBSRC Yorkshire Bioscience Doctoral Training Partnership, including annual stipend, research costs and home tuition fees tinyurl.com/ms7v2pcx

14.11.2025 13:53 👍 18 🔁 37 💬 0 📌 0