As of now, we’re looking for motivated students to work on a PhD project entitled “The role of confidence and urgency in deciding to stop sampling information”, together with Elise Lesage and Tom Verguts. We also have a second opening for a project on “A model-based approach to study transfer in decision making and cognitive control“. All details can be found here.
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!
Subjective Confidence Predicts Information Seeking in Decision Making – new paper out in Psychological Science
Awesome news: Our new paper with Annika Bolt and Nick Yeung is published in Psychological Science! You can find the paper here. The work done in this paper was performed back in 2015, when I spent three extremely fruitful months in the ACC lab at Oxford University.
Mind wandering, cognitive control & metacognition: New publication in PLoS ONE
Last week, the work performed during the master thesis of Leonhard Drescher got accepted at PLoS ONE! The paper itself can be found here, and Lenny and I wrote a blog about it on breinwijzer.be (in Dutch). In this work, we used structural equation modelling to investigate the relationship between metacognition, cognitive control and mind wandering.
To shoot or not to shoot (new blog!)
I wrote another blog (in Dutch) on breinwijzer.be, about the role of racial bias in the decision to shoot (study by Pleskac and colleagues 2017). Interesting application of the drift diffusion model outside the field it’s usually used. Read the blog here!
Confidence and OCD (New blog!)
I wrote a new blog (in Dutch) on breinwijzer.be, about confidence in people suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder (Vaghi, Luyckx, et al., 2017, Neuron). Check it our here!
