We are delighted to announce the winner of the ESCoP Early Career Publication Award for Postdocs! The evaluation committee—Tilo Strobach, Ana Sá Leite, and Luca Moretti—noted an exceptionally high standard across all applications this year, ultimately awarding Marius C. Vollberg and colleagues for their outstanding paper, "Place-related representations in setting the stage for empathy" (Cognition, 2026). This paper was selected for the ESCoP Early Career Publication Award for Postdocs because it is a strong cognitive psychology and social neuroscience paper. It introduces a genuinely novel idea: that imagining places and scenes surrounding victims may be as important for empathy as imagining the people themselves. It is also methodologically compelling, using fMRI-based representational analyses and multiple robustness checks to support a clear mechanistic account linking social affinity, place imagination, and empathy.