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

We are very excited to announce the very first Birmingham-Leiden Computational Social Cognition (CSC) Summer School. The Summer School will take place at the beautiful University of Birmingham campus on the 15th-17th July 2024.

We have a wonderful line-up of speakers and instructors including Wolfram Schultz, Cecilia Heyes and Christian Ruff, as well as Patricia Lockwood (co-organiser) and Jo Cutler from our own lab.

Participants will be provided 4 nights of en-suite accommodation, meals and exciting social events!

Applications are open now (deadline: 14th March 2024).

Click the link to read more and apply.

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

We are very excited to announce a new PhD position available on Understanding and disrupting Social Decision-Making in Health and Disorder under the supervision of Dr. Patricia Lockwood and Dr. Arkady Konovalov and funded by the BBSRC.

Click here to read more

Please email p.l.lockwood@bham.ac.uk with your CV and cover letter before Tuesday 5th December. We look forward to receiving your applications!

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!

Paul has received a distinction (and 95% GPA!) in Open University course: Graduate Certificate in Theoretical Statistics and Probability. A brilliant achievement- congratulations Paul!

Image source: Tara Winstead / Pexels

Patricia Lockwood and Jo Cutler were in Japan this month, attending the CiNet conference and visiting the RIKEN institute!

Read more about the CiNet conference here

Read more about the RIKEN institute here

Congratulations to Patricia Lockwood who has been elected as a Fellow for the Association for Psychological Science for her ‘outstanding contributions to the science of psychology’.

Read more here

We have recently welcomed Janine Pfirrmann, a new Research Assistant/ Lab Manager to the lab. You can find out more about Janine on our ‘People’ page. Welcome!

Image source: Mabel Amber/ Pexels

Having been shortlisted for the Science category, Patricia Lockwood attended the Women of the Future Awards 2022, joined by Cherie Blair CBE, and the Countess of Wessex.

Read more here

Two members of our lab have been awarded Distinctions. Paul’s is in MSc Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Reading. Tabby’s is in MSc Psychology from the University of Birmingham. Congratulations on your achievements!

Image source: RODNAE Productions/ Pexels

We have recently welcomed two new members to our lab. Zhilin Su has entered his first year of a 4-year PhD and Tabitha Hogg is a new Research Assistant/Lab Manager to the lab. You can find out more about them on our ‘People’ page. Welcome!

Image source: cottonbro studio/ Pexels

Jo Cutler was given the ‘Best Talk’ award for her talk titled ‘Damage to ventromedial prefrontal cortex decreases effortful prosocial behaviours’ at 2022 SNE Conference!

Image source: anna shvets/Pexels

Patricia Lockwood is a finalist for the 2022 Women of the Future award in the science category.

Read more here

Jo Cutler was awarded Guarantors of Brain and Society for Neuroeconomics Travel Awards to give talk at SNE conference 2022.

Todd Vogel was also awarded a Global Engagement Fund travel award to present poster at SNE conference 2022.

The Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (SANS) awarded the authors for their innovative paper “Is There a ‘Social’ Brain? Implementations and Algorithms”.

Jo Cutler received the “Excellence in Discovery Science Award for an Early-Career Researcher” as part of the Birmingham School of Psychology Awards.