Topic: Cognitive Neuroscience

NeuroAlliance brings together cellular and systems neuroscience, biological psychiatry and cognitive neuroscience. The scientific programme examines how brain mechanisms shape cognition, behaviour and psychiatric illness, connecting molecular and cellular approaches with neuroimaging, computational analysis and clinical research. Plenaries address the microbiome–brain relationship across the lifespan, neural mechanisms of blindsight, negative self-beliefs and mental health, navigation circuits in Drosophila, biometals in brain disease, human decision-making, ovarian hormones and mental health,

Keynote Address to British Association of Cognitive Neuroscience, London, 10th September 2024

Cognitive neuroscience studies routinely concentrate on calculating the correlation coefficient between trial-averaged Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) and behavioral performance such as response time and accuracy. However there are some disadvantages in this traditional approach: 1) ignoring the variance of EEG data across trials, 2) requiring a large number of participants to find robust inferences, and 3) a lack of formal cognitive models to explain cognition. In this work, we used the drift-diffusion model to decompose perceptual decision making to underlying latent variables to explain be

Because the world is dynamic and only imperfectly observable, many of the decisions we make are necessarily uncertain. How do we navigate such uncertainty? From the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, the classic answer would be that we evaluate the benefits of each potential choice and then lean towards the one promising the greatest reward, modulo some exploratory noise. Conversely, an ethologist would argue that we would stay with previously rewarding choices until the payout drops below a certain threshold, at which point we start exploring other options. While both hypotheses wield con