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,

The Cognitive Neuroscience (CogNeuro) program seeks to fund proposals that can advance our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying human cognition and behavior. Funded proposals typically relate precise and rich quantifications of physiological responses and behavior in ways that advance theory (Intellectual Merit). Funded proposal also typically strengthen the field through, for example, outreach, mentoring the next generation of diverse cognitive neuroscientists, and/or increasing awareness and utilization of the research the field produces (Broader Impacts). Intellectual Merit In

The Cognitive Neuroscience Society’s annual meeting brings together researchers studying the relationships between brain activity and cognition. The four-day programme includes symposia, poster sessions, a keynote and award lectures. The meeting takes place in Boston on 20–23 March 2027. Poster and travel-award applications are due 3 November 2026. Late-breaking posters have a separate January deadline. The organizer labels its dates tentative and subject to change. Regular registration rates end 15 February; onsite rates begin 16 February; hotel reservations close 24 February 2027.

…molecular, computational, clinical and cognitive neuroscience, including neural devices, neuroengineering and AI. Appointees build independent funded programmes, teach, mentor and collaborate across departments. Primary appointments match the research programme, with possible joint affiliations. The university provides startup support, housing assistance and access to neuroscience and clinical infrastructure. Initial review begins 1 December 2026 and continues until filled.

…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

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

…event, with systems and cognitive neuroscience focusing on the number and timing of spike events. This analytical convenience has, in turn, resulted in computational theories of neural coding that assume binarity.Despite this assumption, a considerable body of evidence shows that AP waveforms exhibit systematic, within-neuron variation that may contribute additional informat

The lizard Anolis carolinensis is an interesting model organism in cognitive neuroscience as it possesses an evolutionary very early hippocampal homolog but no neocortex. Whereas behavioral studies suggest that lizards are able to perform similar hippocampus-dependent cognitive tasks as mammals, it is not known whether the functional organization in reptiles is the same as in mammals. One way to probe functional architecture is to investigate neural representations across different subregions, e.g. by immediate early gene imaging, which visualizes genomic responses of activated neuronal popula

The steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) is prevalent in cognitive neuroscience research yet much remains to be learned about how it is generated, including the relative contributions from different visual areas and the temporal delays among them. To address these questions, we exploited the idiosyncratic cortical folding patterns of retinotopically mapped visual areas to generate predictable variations in SSVEP topography across the visual field. Specifically, we regressed empirical topography variations against forward-model predictions generated by the Benson retinotopy atlas for di

A major challenge in cognitive neuroscience is understanding how the spatiotemporal dynamics of neural activity of the cerebral cortex supports the processing of information about external stimuli and its use in forming accurate perceptual decisions. In particular, it is unclear how activity distributed across cortical areas and frequency bands encodes information synergistically or redundantly, and how these emergent properties of interactions across areas relate to perception. Here, we aim to measure synergy and redundancy during an audiovisual task at the mesoscale level in auditory, visual

…reliability of the measures we use in cognitive neuroscience has never been more important. Tasks designed to study individual differences must reliably differentiate participants at the individual rather than the group level. Yet assessing the reliability of a given dataset, and even more so optimizing the design of a new behavioural t

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