Sofie Valk

Sofie Valk

@sofievalk.bsky.social

Bio 🤝 social — Director institute of translational psychiatry, University of Zurich & Psychiatric University Hospital Zurich

2.1K followers2.3K following99 posts

Sofie Valk
@sofievalk.bsky.social

Looking forward!!

Department of Economics @Universität Zürich🇨🇭@econ.uzh.ch

Maike will soon start as a postdoc at this new institute associated to the psychiatric university clinic, with @sofievalk.bsky.social: www.pukzh.ch/forschung/fo...

pukzh.chProf. Dr. Sofie Louise ValkProf. Dr. Sofie Valk leitet das neu geschaffene Institut für Translationale Psychiatrie über die Lebensspanne (ITP) an der PUK und ist ausserordentliche Professorin an der UZH. Ihre Forschung verbinde...

Sofie Valk reposted

Department of Economics @Universität Zürich🇨🇭
@econ.uzh.ch

Replying to @econ.uzh.ch

Maike will soon start as a postdoc at this new institute associated to the psychiatric university clinic, with @sofievalk.bsky.social: www.pukzh.ch/forschung/fo...

pukzh.chProf. Dr. Sofie Louise ValkProf. Dr. Sofie Valk leitet das neu geschaffene Institut für Translationale Psychiatrie über die Lebensspanne (ITP) an der PUK und ist ausserordentliche Professorin an der UZH. Ihre Forschung verbinde...

Sofie Valk reposted

Simon Fisher
@profsimonfisher.bsky.social

“We analyzed 7000 records of learning bouts across wild orangutans’ 8-year dependency period. Social learning was 5x more frequent than individual learning. Immature orangutans with heightened learning propensities developed most expansive diet profiles at independence.” @revathe.bsky.social et al🧪👇

science.orgHow 8 years of social and individual learning interact to shape ecological competence in orangutansCultural learning permeates human skill and knowledge acquisition. To understand its importance for nonhuman apes, we analyzed just under 7000 records of behavioral bouts of social and individual lear...

Sofie Valk reposted

Romy Lorenz
@romy-lorenz.bsky.social

Please share widely! 🚀 I am recruiting a PhD student for an exciting cross-species collaborative project using layer fMRI to investigate how interoception shapes cognitive control - Application deadline is: 1.10.2026 - Start: Jan 2027 www.mpg.de/26934670/phd...

mpg.dePhD Position (m/f/d) | Ultra-High-Field Layer fMRI of Cognitive Control and InteroceptionPhD Position in Ultra-High-Field Layer fMRI of Cognitive Control and Interoception

Sofie Valk reposted

Matthias Nau
@matthiasnau.bsky.social

🚨 Job alert 🚨 Our department @vuamsterdam.bsky.social is hiring an Assistant Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience! Join our lovely community here in beautiful Amsterdam! 🧠🔥 Deadline: October 15 Apply: workingat.vu.nl/vacancies/as...

workingat.vu.nlVacancy — Assistant Professor in Cognitive NeuroscienceJoin the Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) as Assistant Professor in cognitive neuroscience.
Sofie Valk
@sofievalk.bsky.social

Super proud of the work led by @meikehettwer.bsky.social activating a tour du force of six enigma working groups (depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, and autism) plus enigma gradients to a 20.000+ lifespan sample from 172 sites and 6 continents

Sofie Valk
@sofievalk.bsky.social

This shared organization provides a map for reconciling individual variability with transdiagnostic similarities and motivates an integrative, systems-level understanding of mental health

Sofie Valk reposted

Ashley Tyrer
@ashleytyrer.bsky.social

1/ I’m delighted to share our new paper, out now in @cpsyjournal.bsky.social with @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social and @micahgallen.com, correlating variations in cortical microstructures with individual differences in gamified exploration-exploitation behaviours! 🧵 doi.org/10.5334/cpsy...

doi.orgCortical Microstructural Variations Correlate With Individual Differences in Gamified Exploration–Exploitation Behaviours | Computational Psychiatry
Sofie Valk
@sofievalk.bsky.social

Overall our work illustrates that these aren’t two separate systems mapped onto isocortex side by side, but structures that are finely interdigitated with each other across the cortical sheet.

Sofie Valk
@sofievalk.bsky.social

Both structures shared coupling with paralimbic and (more weakly) default mode cortex. But they diverged in character: hippocampus tracked more with default-mode and visual networks, amygdala with ventral attention and limbic networks.

Sofie Valk
@sofievalk.bsky.social

Even at the subfield/nucleus level the pattern held, and interestingly the paralaminar nucleus came out as the most “hippocampus-like” part of the amygdala.

Sofie Valk
@sofievalk.bsky.social

Yigit Eriguec studied how hippocampal subfields and amygdalar nuclei are jointly wired into the cortex, two neighboring structures usually studied separately.

Sofie Valk
@sofievalk.bsky.social

Using resting-state fMRI in 722 HCP Young Adult participants, we mapped both structures’ subregions onto cortex using two connectivity metrics: Pearson correlation for broad co-fluctuation, and GLASSO partial correlation for more direct associations.

Sofie Valk
@sofievalk.bsky.social

Thanks to Alfred Anwander, Amin Saberi, Katerina Manoli, Jessica Royer, Doruk Yigit Eriguc, Valerie Jill Sydnor, Bin Wan, Simon Eickhoff and Boris Bernhardt for the thoughtful support and feedback along the way!

Sofie Valk
@sofievalk.bsky.social

These findings are a key step towards precision models of thalamocortical connectivity, which is relevant to better understand the role of this system in cognition and brain/mental health.

Sofie Valk
@sofievalk.bsky.social

Finally, these structural and functional shifts tracked with reductions in nucleus volume, pointing to pruning and intra-nucleus remodeling as a shared mechanism behind both effects.

Sofie Valk
@sofievalk.bsky.social

What we found: FA increases with age across the board, but the timing and magnitude differ by nucleus. Sensory-projecting nuclei rich in "core" cells plateau early, while association-projecting, "matrix"-rich nuclei keep maturing well into adolescence.

Sofie Valk
@sofievalk.bsky.social

At the same time, functional thalamocortical connectivity decreased with age, and this decrease was coupled with FA changes specifically in the nuclei showing prolonged structural maturation.

Sofie Valk
@sofievalk.bsky.social

Using the Human Connectome Project in Development dataset (N=604, ages 8 to 21), we segmented 10 thalamic nuclei and reconstructed their nucleus-specific connections to cortex using probabilistic tractography. We then tracked how these connections mature using fractional anisotropy.

Sofie Valk reposted

SPACE Lab
@spacelabimt.bsky.social

New study in Communications Psychology: large-scale NLP analysis of dream reports reveals the structure, content, and determinants of dreaming. 💤💭 www.nature.com/articles/s44... #sleepscience #sleepresearch #dreamscience #dreamresearch

nature.comIndividual traits and experiences predict the content of dreams - Communications PsychologyIndividual traits and experiences jointly shape dream content. By analyzing the semantic structure of thousands of reports, we reveal systematic patterns showing how dreams reflect personality, sleep ...

Sofie Valk reposted

The Atlantic
@theatlantic.com

As the weather gets nicer, many of us feel the allure of hanging out. But modern life can make it hard to find places to just be, or to make new friends, Isabel Fattal writes in the Wonder Reader: theatln.tc/KhWkbk52

Sofie Valk reposted

Rick Betzel
@richardfbetzel.bsky.social

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Awesome new work from Nick Weaver and Chris Lynn. How complicated is the human brain, really? This paper introduces a way to measure the compressibility of brain activity -- i.e. how many correlations do you actually need to predict large-scale neural activity. 1/

pnas.orgPNASProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Sofie Valk reposted

Tobias Hauser
@tobiasuhauser.bsky.social

Very happy to see this out now in @nathumbehav.nature.com - kudos to @magdadelrio.bsky.social who has led this work and nicely brought together data from two very different studies! article is here: doi.org/10.1038/s415... and PDF is here: rdcu.be/eZ27x

rdcu.beIndecision and recency-weighted evidence integration in non-clinical and clinical settingsNature Human Behaviour - This research finds a strong recency bias in information gathering, attenuated in those on the OCD spectrum—a possible mechanism for indecisiveness. Behavioural and...
Magda del Río@magdadelrio.bsky.social

New preprint from my postdoc with @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social at the MPC! TL;DR: there is a strong recency bias in information gathering and it is attenuated in people on the #OCD spectrum - a possible mechanism for #indecisiveness 🤔 Paper here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Thread below...

biorxiv.orgIndecision and recency-weighted evidence integration in non-clinical and clinical settingsBiases in information gathering are common in the general population and can reach pathological extremes in paralysing indecisiveness, as in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Here, we adopt a new p...
Sofie Valk
@sofievalk.bsky.social

Happy to have been able to contribute to this great work 👶🗻⛰️🏔️

Cedric Boeckx@cedricboeckx.bsky.social

Very happy to see this great study by @skrohn.bsky.social @carstenfinke.bsky.social @engra.me @sofievalk.bsky.social on brain shape & human brain development, out in @natneuro.nature.com 🧪🧠 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.comFractal analysis of brain shape formation predicts age and genetic similarity in human newborns - Nature NeuroscienceFractal analysis of structural MRI captures the formation of brain shape in human newborns and outperforms other morphological measures in predicting infant age and genetic similarity, including the i...

Sofie Valk reposted

ETH Zurich
@ethz.ch

In a groundbreaking study, an international team led by ETH Zurich researchers has for the first time calculated how many glaciers worldwide are likely to remain until the end of the century and for how long. It looks bleak. ethz.ch/en/news-and-...

ethz.chThe Alps to lose a record number of glaciers in the next decadeHow much longer will glaciers survive? A new study from ETH Zurich researchers offers the first detailed projection of how many glaciers could vanish by 2100 due to global warming – and why regions su...

Sofie Valk reposted

Amin Saberi
@amnsbr.bsky.social

Replying to @amnsbr.bsky.social

I’m now a bit obsessed with GPUs 🤓 They have great potential for scaling up neuroimaging and neuroscience analyses 📈 Coming up next: GPU-accelerated neuroimaging meta-analyses (work in progress 🚧: github.com/amnsbr/nimar...) 20/n

github.comGitHub - amnsbr/nimare-gpu: GPU-accelerated activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis (a GPU wrapper for NiMARE)GPU-accelerated activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis (a GPU wrapper for NiMARE) - amnsbr/nimare-gpu

Sofie Valk reposted

Andrew Reid
@reid-lab.org

This is 🤯 All publicly available. Looks like an amazing new histology-based human probabilistic atlas and parcellation tool. #neuroskyence #mri #brainmapping A probabilistic histological atlas of the human brain for MRI segmentation | Nature share.google/5AD0iW7pxgb4...

share.googleA probabilistic histological atlas of the human brain for MRI segmentation - NatureNextBrain is an open source, probabilistic atlas of the entire human brain, assembled using artificial-intelligence-enabled registration and segmentation methods to reconstruct the multimodal serial h...

Sofie Valk reposted

Rebecca R Helm
@rebeccarhelm.bsky.social

Many sea stars begin life as young fairy-like creature (called a brachiolaria) that float through the open ocean. Eventually, a small star forms within them (here in yellow). The fairy-like brachiolaria sinks under the star’s weight, and the star pops out! 🎥@the_story_of_a_biologist (on Insta)

Sofie Valk reposted

Nature Methods
@natmethods.nature.com

HippoMaps: an open-source resource for studying the human hippocampus at different scales and with different modalities. www.nature.com/articles/s41... @jordandekraker.bsky.social @borismontreal.bsky.social @jclauneuro.bsky.social @neuroak.bsky.social @sofievalk.bsky.social @donnagift.bsky.social

nature.comHippoMaps: multiscale cartography of human hippocampal organization - Nature MethodsHippoMaps provides an open-source resource for studying the human hippocampus at different scales and with different modalities such as histology, fMRI, structural MRI and EEG.