We’re proud to report that the Society for Neuroeconomics (SNE) awarded their 2024 Early Career Award to Patricia Lockwood. This award demonstrates significant contributions to understanding the neural basis of decision making and the impact of this knowledge on formal understanding of decision behavior, an incredible achievement! Congratulations for Pat!

The Social Decision Neuroscience lab travelled to Cascais to attend the Society for Neuroeconomics (SNE) 2024 conference.

Jo Cutler gave a poster spotlight talk on the first day: “Psychological interventions increase motivation to exert effort to mitigate climate change".

Jo Cutler, Todd Vogel, Margot Gueguen, Paul Vanags, Zhilin Su and Janine Pfirrmann all presented posters on current projects.  

It was incredible to meet researchers from around the world and share our upcoming research with them, we also enjoyed exploring Cascais in the sunshine!

There are two new positions within the SDNL available to apply for now.

The first is a new fully funded 3.5 year PhD in Decision Neuroscience. Open to international students. Deadline 10th May.

Read more and apply here for the PhD

The second is a Research Assistant/ Lab manager position contributing to projects on decision-making. Deadline 19th May.

Read more and apply here for the RA position

Jo Cutler’s Wellcome Fellowship began this month, after being awarded Wellcome Trust funding for her exciting new project Neurocomputational mechanisms of seeking information about oneself and other people, which will investigate how we seek information about what is happening to other people. The project is in collaboration with Patricia Lockwood, Matthew Apps and Ole Jenson from the University of Birmingham and collaborators from Freie Universität Berlin and University of California San Francisco.

Congratulations Jo - an exciting new beginning!

Patricia Lockwood and Jo Cutler recently attended the Society for Social Neuroscience (S4SN) meeting in Tsukuba, Japan. They had a great time presenting recent work from the SDNL and exploring Japan.

Read more about the meeting here

In very exciting news, Patricia Lockwood has recently been promoted to full Professor of Decision Neuroscience.

Congratulations on your momentous achievement Prof. Lockwood!

Image source: Brett Garwood / Pexels

A huge congratulations to Zhilin, who has published his first ever Preprint during his PhD: “Older adults are more susceptible to impulsive social influence”.

Read Zhilin’s paper here

Paul Vanags’ will be working with Dr Seongmin Parks' group at the Institute of Cognitive Science in Lyon for 3 months later this year for his Overseas Institutional Visit. Dr Park is an expert in group-based decision making processes and fMRI analysis techniques, so Paul is looking forward to learning more about this and working with the team on extending his PhD work into this area.

We are sure Paul will have an amazing time in Lyon!

Dr Seongmin Parks' group

Institute of Cognitive Science

In exciting news for the lab, Pat and Jo are giving talks at the Society for Social Neuroscience (S4SN) Conference (March 2024) in Japan! Registration is open now.

Check the program here

Congratulations to Margot Gueguen and Patricia Lockwood for publishing Margot’s first PhD paper in Communications Psychology. New commentary: “Social psychology: Predicting other people’s attention to understand their mind”. A great achievement.

Read Margot and Pat’s paper

Jo Cutler has been awarded Wellcome Trust funding for her exciting new project Neurocomputational mechanisms of seeking information about oneself and other people, which will investigate how we seek information about what is happening to other people. The project is in collaboration with Patricia Lockwood, Matthew Apps and Ole Jenson from the University of Birmingham and collaborators from Freie Universität Berlin and University of California San Francisco. A huge congratulations to Jo on her excellent achievement!

Read more about the fellowship here

In very exciting news the British Association for Cognitive Neuroscience (BACN) have awarded their 2024 Early Career Award to Patricia Lockwood. A fantastic achievement - and huge congratulations to Pat!

Read more about the award here

Last week the Social Decision Neuroscience lab travelled to Lyon and attended the Motivation and Cognitive Control (MCC) conference.

Jo Cutler gave a talk on the first day: "Damage to ventromedial prefrontal cortex reduces prosocial behaviours and effort sensitivity".

Todd Vogel, Margot Gueguen, Paul Vanags, Zhilin Su, Tabitha Hogg and Janine Pfirrmann all presented posters on their current projects.  

It was a brilliant opportunity to share some of our exciting new research and meet with international researchers in the field, and we enjoyed exploring the city together in beautiful sunshine!

Read more about the MCC conference here

For our Lab Retreat this year, we travelled over to Oxford with Matthew Apps’ Motivation and Social Neuroscience lab, and spent the day sharing ideas (and cakes!) in Corpus Christi College.

During this year’s main activity, aptly named ‘Empathy for pain: Designing somebody else’s next project’, researchers were paired up and tasked with theoretically designing each other’s next study. It was refreshing to think outside of our own projects and we have returned to Birmingham feeling inspired.

For some of us it was a first visit to Oxford, for other’s a familiar stomping ground: perfect for exploring the city and sharing it’s history. We even had time for a fun (and only slightly competitive) science quiz.

A huge thank you to all involved - we look forward to the next one!

Zhilin Su and Paul Vanags have passed their first year PhD end-of-year vivas. A huge congratulations to them both on a successful first 12-months in the lab!