By Ruud van den Brink & Tobias Donner. A class of neurotransmitters known as catecholamines (norepinephrine and dopamine) play an important modulatory role in brain function. These catecholamines are synthesised by neurons clustered in small nuclei of the brainstem, which
New paper out in J Neuroscience: Surprise About Sensory Event Timing Drives Cortical Transients in the Beta Frequency Band
By Thomas Meindertsma & Tobias Donner. The brain continuously tracks the statistical structure of the environment to anticipate behaviorally relevant events. Deviations from such predictions cause surprise, a violation of the agent’s expectation about an event, which might be indicative
The Baylor-UKE connection: the visit of Matt McGinley
From Jan Willem de Gee and Tobias Donner. We recently hosted Dr. Matthew G. McGinley as a Visiting Researcher funded by the SFB936 program, currently running in its second phase here at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. Our reason to
New paper published in PLoS Biology: Catecholamines alter the intrinsic variability of cortical population activity and perception
By Thomas Pfeffer and Tobias Donner. The catecholaminergic neurotransmitters noradrenaline and dopamine are important regulators of brain state, and their function is impaired in several psychiatric disorders. An influential account posits that noradrenaline renders inference and decision-making more variable (exploratory)
New paper published in J Neuroscience: Adaptive History Biases Result from Confidence-weighted Accumulation of Past Choices
By Anke Braun & Tobias Donner. Our decisions are often influenced by the history of our preceding choices: We tend to repeat (or alternate) decisions more often than expected by chance. Computational models postulate that these choice history biases result
Gender diversity in academia
By Anne Urai & Tobias Donner. Although we’d all like academia to be a true meritocracy, implicit biases shared by all of us create significant hurdles to achieving diversity in our communities. We discussed the data (showing both the extent to
PhD “summa cum laude” for Anne Urai
Anne Urai was awarded her PhD with distinction (“summa cum laude”). Anne gave a wonderful talk summarizing her outstanding work over the past 4.5 years. Her studies provided important and novel insights into the computational and neural basis of history biases in human choice behavior. We celebrated Anne’s defence as well
Our lab’s take on authorship
By Jan Willem de Gee, Anne Urai & Tobias Donner. This blog post expresses the opinion of the authors and has been agreed upon by the members of the lab. The post does not represent the official position of the University
NVP dissertation prize for Anne Urai
Anne has won the dissertation prize of the Dutch Society of Psychonomics (NVP), which is awarded every two years for the best PhD thesis in the field of cognitive neuroscience. The jury was impressed not only by the quality of the
PhD “summa cum laude” for Tom Pfeffer
Tom Pfeffer was awarded his PhD with distinction (“summa cum laude”). In the defence of his thesis, Tom gave a fantastic talk that summarised all the diverse work has done over the past 4 years. The committee and one further external reviewer were truly impressed. Tom’s PhD