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.

The past few weeks have been busy. We enjoyed the OHBM annual meeting in Singapore, packed with interesting food, tropical fruits, humid heat, and of course excellent science. The lab members presented four posters from our ongoing projects. It is nice to see them coming closer to the finishing line.

In Krakow, we organized a symposium at the ASSC annual meeting, in which we emphasized that that voluntary action paradigms, or forced choice between similar options, can be a powerful tool to investigate endogenous factors that influence decision-making processes.

We welcome our new PhD student Aysegul, who started this month and is interested in value/memory-based decision-making.

We are also sad to say goodbye to Beth. Beth completed her fellowship at CUBRIC and started new adventure as a science communication officer. We wish Beth all the best in her new role!