Brain lactate and other metabolites can be measured with functional MRS at 3T! Great work led by @martinw3141 The Centre for Human Brain Health.

Nice to play a part in this important study showing that lesions to ventromedial prefrontal cortex in the human brain impair the willingness to exert effort for others. Led by Jo Cutler, Patricia Lockwood from The Centre for Human Brain Health & Sanjay Manohar.

Read our blog, ‘How Do We Decide to Leave a Social Interaction?’ by Prof. Matthew Apps and me on a recent paper by Gabay et al. (2024). Special thanks to @AnthonyGabay, Patricia Lockwood, and Jo Cutler. psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-he…

Yesterday these lovely people from Motivation & Social Neuroscience (MSN) lab started our first psychopharmacology study The Centre for Human Brain Health / School of Psychology, University of Birmingham looking at the effects if dopaminergic medication on thr computational mechanisms of effort and reward. Exciting new step for the lab.

Today we (led by Patricia Lockwood) kick off the Birmingham-Leiden Computational Social Cognition Summer School The Centre for Human Brain Health / School of Psychology, University of Birmingham. 70+ students from across the globe will learn how and why to use Computational modelling in Psychological and Neuroscience research.

Exciting to have such a diverse set of attendees, who were selected from amongst nearly 200 applicants and we were able to do this thanks to Uni of Birmingham Global Engagement Fund. compsoccog.com

Uni of Birmingham First up the fantastic Wellcome Early Career Fellow Jo Cutler walking us through the different steps you need to take when using computational modelling.

Next up our first keynote talk by Cecilia Heyes on cognitive gadgets.

After my own talk, we now have Patricia Lockwood talking about prosocial leaning models.

Patricia Lockwood Now for Jo Cutler again doing a practical introduction to computational modelling.

Patricia Lockwood Jo Cutler Good morning. After the very English BBQ last night, we start today with Annabel Losecaat Vermeer talking about modelling social dominance learning and testosterone.

Next up Arkady Konovalov presenting classic behavioural economics work on strategic social interactions.

Now for our second keynote session from Christian Ruff on "Assessing Mentalization"

Christian Ruff Post lunch, we have Romy Frömer with a tutorial on sequential sampling models.

The final day and we have a fantastic historical account of how theories from economics and psychology can inform our understanding of reward from the great Wolfram Schultz.

The last tutorial of the summer school, from the fantastic Lei Zhang | 张磊 (@lei-zhang.bsky.social), on bayesian hierarchical modelling

A significant few weeks for my Motivation & Social Neuroscience (MSN) lab. Last month saw the end of 8 years of sustained support from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research first from a Future Leader fellowship then a David Phillips Fellowship. This has been transformative for me scientifically and personally. Having such long-standing 1/

This month also saw the start of my European Research Council (ERC) (funded through UK Research and Innovation) Consolidator Grant - Effdox. Over the next 5 years we will be taking a multimodal approach to uncover the mechanisms that allow the brain to switch between avoiding effort, to valuing and seeking it.

💥I'm thrilled to announce that our paper "A reward self-bias leads to more optimal foraging for ourselves than others" is now published in Scientific Reports! 🧵Curious how self-bias shapes dynamic decision-making? Read it here: nature.com/articles/s4159…