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
Our lab’s take on open science
By Kobe Desender and Anne Urai. This blog post expresses the opinion of the members of the lab. The post does not represent the official position of the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE), or of the Department of Neurophysiology & Pathophysiology, UKE.
UKE “Paper of the Month” award for Jan Willem de Gee
Our recent paper titled “Dynamic modulation of decision biases by brainstem arousal systems” was selected as the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) “Paper of the Month”. The accompanying text reads as follows: The paper constitutes a significant advancement in the
New paper published in J Neuroscience: Multiple transient signals in human visual cortex associated with an elementary decision
By Thomas Meindertsma and Tobias Donner. Even the most elementary perceptual decisions result from complex cascades of neural computations in the brain. Such elementary decisions entail responding to simple patterns of light on the retina with arbitrarily mapped motor act. Previous research has shown