Thanks to huge efforts of Doby Rahnev, a large collection of open data on behavioral tasks using subjective ratings was just made available. The database contains (at current) 145 datasets, and is fully open for everyone to use. I added a couple of my own datasets on subjective difficulty, with the hope that people might find it interestingt to examine whether different types of ratings (confidence, subjective difficulty, etc.) show the same or different dynamics. I think this is a great, ambitious project, that can tremendously speed up model developments! The database itself can be found here, while a paper describing the database can be found on psyarxiv. If you want to help popularizing the database on twitter, here’s Doby tweet about it.
Songs!
In order to make this page more fun to visit, I added a couple of songs from my band to this website! In my free time, I play keys and guitar in Tales of Taori, and make music together with Mr Oak in Rhubarb, so a bit (more) shameless self-promotion!
One of the ideas I’d like to pursue is to actually make songs about my research, which I think is an enourmous untapped market! Hopefully soon…
PhD opening!
As of now, we are looking for a motivated PhD student to conduct research in the field of cognitive control under the supervision of Eva Van den Bussche, Kobe Desender and Gethin Hughes.
A neural marker of confidence predicts information seeking – new paper in Journal of Neuroscience
Awesome news: our paper on the neural markers of confidence and information seeking, with Peter Murphy, Annika Boldt, Tom Verguts and Nick Yeung, has now been in accepted in The Journal of Neuroscience. You can find the paper here! Data collection for this study was done back in 2015 (ages ago, it feels) when I spent three months in Nick Yeung’s lab at Oxford University. Actually, I collected these data in the very last week of my stay there – so the ratio data analysis/writing versus data collection for this project must be about 205:1.
PhD opening!
Two Research Grants!
Awesome news today: two research grant proposals were accepted by the FWO-Vlaanderen, so soon we’ll be investigating the contagious nature of cognitive control (with Eva Van den Bussche and Gethin Hughes) and the influence of certainty and urgency on making choices (with Elise Lesage and Tom Verguts). Very excited about both of these – guess we’re looking for interested, prospective PhD-students from now on!
First preprint: A post-decisional neural marker of confidence predicts information-seeking
I just posted my first preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/10/02/433276.
Here, we followed up on the findings of our recent psych science paper, and tested which neural markers translate subjective confidence into overt decisions to sample additional information. Using multivariate single-trial decoding, we showed that a classifier trained to decode high vs low confidence from EEG data, can predict information-seeking choices. Thus, our findings unravel a shared neural coding for decision confidence and information-seeking choices!
Curious to see how this will work out.
Transgender and the brain (new blog!)
I wrote another blog for studio brein (in Dutch) about a breinwijzer presentation I attended focussing on transgenders and their brains. Very fascinating topic, altough the take-home message was -more or less- that there’s very little we already know about the brain of transgenders! So af often: more work to do! Read the full blog here
Winner of the first BAPS PhD award!
At this year’s annual meeting of the Belgian Association for Psychological Science (BAPS) I was awarded with the first PhD award (1000€) for my PhD work (The role of metacognition in cognitive control). Continue reading
Unconscious exposure to your fears (new blog!)
I wrote another blog (in Dutch) on breinwijzer.be, about decoded neurofeedback (DecNef) as a potential treatment for common fears (study by and colleagues, in PNAS 2018). Very cool approach, although I wasn’t fully convinced by the data itself. Read the blog here!
