Milena Musial

I’m a final year ECN and BCCN PhD student with Florian Schlagenhauf in the Learning & Cognition Lab at Charité Berlin.

The main questions that spark my curiosity at the moment are: How do we learn from our environment and represent what we have learned in our brains? When and how are neural representations of physical and abstract relationships (“cognitive maps”) learned incrementally or in a single shot? What defines a “state” in such a cognitive map? And finally, how does the brain encode, store, and retrieve context-dependent cognitive maps?

Methods-wise, I mostly work with task-based behavioral and fMRI data and use computational modeling, model-based fMRI analyses, and representational similarity analysis to make sense of these data.

If you’re interested in what I’ve done so far, you can find my CV here .

Feel free to reach out at milena.musial[at]charite.de.

Publications

Bode, E. L., Musial, M. P. M., Ebrahimi, C., Grundmann, C., Krasniqi, S., Sebold, M., Endrass, T., & Schlagenhauf, F. Alcohol Reinforcers Attenuate Goal-Directed Control in Individuals with Alcohol Use Disorder and Healthy Controls. [Manuscript submitted for publication]. [preprint]

Musial, M. P. M., Bode, E. L., Prychynenko, D. S., Grundmann, C. C., Ebrahimi, C., Endrass, T., & Schlagenhauf, F. Learning from Alcohol Rewards: Neural Signatures of Drug-Related Reward Prediction Errors in Alcohol Use Disorder. [Manuscript submitted for publication]. [preprint]

Musial, M. P. M., Hall-McMaster, S., Shimomura, K., Kato, A., Bode, E. L., Grundmann, C. C., Ebrahimi, C., Morita, K., Gershman, S. J., Endrass, T., & Schlagenhauf, F. The successor representation in high-risk drinking and alcohol-related contexts. [Manuscript submitted for publication]. [preprint]

Reichert, D., Zech, H., Reinhard, I., Groß, R., Deeken, F., Hoffmann, S., Arntz, F., Ghadami, A., Ebrahimi, C., Musial, M. P. M., Hauke, M., Rosenthal, A., Wenzel, J., Ganz, M., Kockler, T., Steffen, J., Diallo, L., Wiedenhöft, J., Spitta, G., Bahr, N., Beste, C., Strehle, J., Bach, P., Banaschewski, T., Smolka, M., Kiefer, F., Endrass, T., Deserno, L., Pilhatsch, M., Vollstädt-Klein, S., Heim, C., Schlagenhauf, F., Walter, H., Spanagel, R., Liu, S., Lenz, B., Kliegl, R., Meyer-Lindenberg, A., Tost, H., Heinz, A., Rapp, M., & Ebner-Priemer, U. Severely affected individuals with alcohol use disorder are able to intentionally reduce alcohol consumption in everyday life. [Manuscript submitted for publication].

Ebrahimi, C. & Musial, M. P. M., Doñamayor, N., Prychynenko, D. S., Bode, E.L., Spanagel, R., Heinz, A., Deserno, L., Smolka, M. N., Ebner-Priemer, U., Kliegl, R., Endrass, T., Reichert, M., Rapp, M., & Schlagenhauf, F. (2025). Goal-directed behavior and hippocampal activity predict real-life impact of drinking intentions in alcohol use disorder. Translational Psychiatry. [paper]

Grundmann, C. C., Arndt, V. A., Ebrahimi, C., Musial, M. P. M., Bode, E. L., Schlagenhauf, F., & Endrass, T. (2025). Studying human habit formation through motor sequence learning. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience. [paper]

Rane, R.P. & Musial, M.P.M., Beck, A., Rapp, M., Schlagenhauf, F., Banaschewski, T., Bokde, A.L.W., Paillère Martinot, M.-L., Artiges, E., Nees, F., Lemaitre, H., Hohmann, S., Schumann, G., Walter, H., Heinz, A., Ritter, K., & IMAGEN consortium (2023). Uncontrolled eating and sensation-seeking partially explain the prediction of future binge drinking from adolescent brain structure. NeuroImage: Clinical, 40, 103520. [paper] [preprint]

Musial, M.P.M., Beck, A., Rosenthal, A., Charlet, K., Bach, P., Kiefer, F., Vollstädt-Klein, S., Walter, H., Heinz, A., & Rothkirch, M. (2023). Reward processing in alcohol-dependent patients and first-degree relatives: Functional brain activity during anticipation of monetary gains and losses. Biological Psychiatry, 93(6), 546–557. [paper]

Current preregistered projects

Effects of psilocybin-assisted therapy on neural signatures of cognitive flexibility in depression. [preregistration]

Habitual vs. goal-directed strategies as drivers of drug-related choices in cannabis use disorder. [preregistration]