This week we welcome Marinho Lopes to join us. Marinho is affiliated with the University of Bristol. He is working on a GW4 collaborative project, in which we are developing recurrent analysis methods MEG/EEG data from patients with epilepsy.

Several lab members joined this years’ OHBM annual meeting in Rome. Esin and Wojciech organised a well-attended training course “The Missing Link: How to Combine Neuroimaging Data with Computational Models of Behavior”.

Do you receive questions from your friends and family what exactly you are doing in science? When you want to respond, do you have the temptation to use words “MR, MEG, computational models etc” which do not make much sense in daily life? Then, you may consider devising new ways to explain yourself without technical terminology.

Last week, Esin spoke on the Soapbox Science event in Cardiff City centre. Soapbox Science provides a platform for scientists to explain their research to the general public on streets (without computers!). Esin talked about her work titled “How and when do we make decisions? Trace back from behaviour and brain.” She met with people, young, old, as well as little ones, who are enthusiastic about the human brain. We have received many positive feedback, including volunteers interested in participating our ongoing experiments. Well done!

This week we welcome Ioana Filipas to join us. Ioana is funded by Cardiff University’s CUROP scheme, which supports undergraduate students for a short period of research experience. She will work with Wojciech on a new pilot experiment on preference-based decision making.

A new paper by Esin Karahan and our collaborators is published on the Journal of Neuroscience. We showed that higher DWI-based neurite density in the corticospinal tract is negatively associated with action speed in a simple reaction time task. Our results confirmed the common assumption that the non-decision time is rooted in the primary motor pathway of the brain. We put forward a simple analysis pipeline to search for structural-functional associations along the principal direction of fiber bundles, which would be useful in further studies on anatomically specific brain-behaviour associations.

The paper is now available online.