Efsun Annac, Ph.D.

The Blue Brain Project released their first digital 3D brain cell atlas. I found it super cool! Check it out! Here is the original article:  https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fninf.2018.00084/full?utm_source=FWEB&utm_medium=NBLOG&utm_campaign=ECO_FNINF_blue-brain-cell-atlas Try the Blue Brain Atlas here in this link:  https://bbp.epfl.ch/nexus/cell-atlas/?v=v2&std=1

Our collaborative work with Dr. Katarzyna Kurcyus and Nina M. Hanning is published in the Journal of Neuroscience with the title: Opposite dynamics of GABA and glutamate levels in the occipital cortex during visual processing Katarzyna Kurcyus ,  Efsun Annac ,  Nina M. Hanning ,  Ashley D. Harris ,  Georg Oeltzschner ,  Richard Edden  and  Valentin Riedl Abstract: Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) measures the two most common inhibitory and excitatory neurotransmitters, GABA and glutamate, in the human brain. However, the role of MRS-derived GABA and glutamate signals in relation to system-level neural signaling and behavior is not fully understood. In this study, we investigated levels of GABA and glutamate in the visual cortex of healthy human participants (both genders) in three functional states with increasing visual input. Compared to a baseline state of eyes closed, GABA levels decreased after opening the eyes in darkness and Glx leve...

A secondary task is not always costly: Context‐based guidance of visual search survives interference from a demanding working memory task Efsun Annac, Xuelian Zang, Hermann J. M üller, & Thomas Geyer Abstract:  Repeatedly encountering a visual search display with the target located at a fixed position relative to the distractors facilitates target detection, relative to novel displays – which is attributed to search guidance by (acquired) long‐term memory (LTM) of the distractor ‘context’ of the target. Previous research has shown that this ‘contextual cueing’ effect is severely impeded during learning when participants have to perform a demanding spatial working memory (WM) task concurrently with the search task, though it does become manifest when the WM task is removed. This has led to the proposal that search guidance by LT context memories critically depends on spatial WM to become ‘expressed’ in behaviour . On this background, this study, of two experiments, aske...

You are not alone in this journey I started writing blog posts on Ph.D. and stress because for a long time I couldn't find anything on the internet to guide me on this subject. Every post I found was about either quitting Ph.D., or being depressed during Ph.D. None of the posts could reflect what I have been through or were a translation of what I felt. Today's post is to remind you that you are not alone . Ph.D. stress is something all Ph.D.'s should be aware of. Many times we don't even realize how demanding Ph.D. can be with its regular stress. Deadlines, experiments, meetings and all the problems you encounter with occupy your mind and make you feel like having a stressful day is a normal routine. However, dealing with stress in those busy days is not easy when you are overwhelmed with the work. Sometimes the frustration of not being able to deal with everything in a limited time makes your life miserable, and accept it or not, you are the only person who has t...

Ph.D. life is quite stressful with its ups and downs. Deadlines, experiment problems, analysis, meeting pressures, presentations, future worries, anxiety, existential crises, mistakes etc. make your life miserable sometimes. As a Ph.D. candidate, I have spent a big part of my Ph.D. worried, frustrated and stressed about several issues. One day, I even decided to quit and talked to my supervisor, and I am not a quitter. After a while, I started to have health problems, and as my doctors told me, they were due to stress. (Okay okay, I admit, caffeine also had a big role! Never start your day with 2 cups of coffee and no breakfast....) After a while, you become better at dealing with problems. However, dealing with stress is not so easy when you are not even aware of it.  The physical effects of stress make you miserable. I remember many times I couldn't calm myself down for a long time even after solving a problem or submitting my paper. In the end, I decided to ...

The results of our new publication will be presented in ECVP 2017 with the title  "Local item density modulates adaptation of learned contextual cues "  Programme details:  http://www.ecvp.org/2017/programme.html Please find the details on the website of the conference:  http://www.ecvp.org/2017/

Local item density modulates adaptation of learned contextual cues Visual Cognition, 16 June 2017 Efsun Annac, Markus Conci, Hermann J. M üller, & Thomas Geyer Department of Psychology +  Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich Abstract : In everyday scenes, searched-for targets do not appear in isolation, but are embedded within configurations of non-target or distractor items. If the position of the target relative to the distractors is invariant, such spatial contingencies are implicitly learned and come to guide visual scanning (“contextual cueing”). However, the effectiveness of contextual cueing depends heavily on the consistency between bottom-up perceptual input and context memory: following configural learning, re-locating targets to an unexpected location within an unchanged distractor context completely abolishes contextual cueing, and gains deriving from the invariant context recover only very slowly with ...