We are happy to welcome a new member to our lab! Jesse (23) is a student at the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Master at Radboud University, Nijmegen. Under the daily supervision of Johannes, he will be working on his Master’s thesis research project where he will look at the neural underpinnings of motivational biases during learning and decision-making processes. For more information, check out his personal page.

Annelies van Nuland defended her doctoral thesis on "Molecular, structural, and behavioral differences between tremor dominant and non-tremor Parkinson’s disease". Congrats Annelies!

We are welcoming another new member to the lab! After doing a bachelor in Health and Life Sciences and a masters in Cognitive Neuroscience, Floortje is now joining the lab for her PhD, supervised by Hanneke. She will be working on Hanneke’s VIDI project: “Getting things done: Unravelling the neurocognitive mechanisms of adaptive decision-making”, using behavioural paradigms, psychopharmacology and potentially fMRI. Check out her personal page for more information!

Hanneke’s research has been turned into a set of teaching materials for primary school students. These materials have now been released at the Radboud Winter school.

Congratulations to Elena for joining the lab! Elena (28) is a new PhD student, working in both Hanneke den Ouden’s lab and Roshan Cools’ lab. She is part of the Language in Interaction consortium, where she investigates the role of cognitive maps and dopamine in linguistic inference, using a combination of functional MRI and psychopharmacology in healthy human volunteers. For more information, check out her personal page!

The study “Catecholaminergic modulation of meta-learning” is now published online in eLife. In this study, we examined how the enhancement of catecholamine function modulates the ability to optimise the learning rate as a function of environmental volatility. The results indicate that blocking the catecholamine transporter with methylphenidate enhanced the ability to adapt the learning rate. Specifically, participants showed higher learning rates in volatile relative to stable phases. The paper can be found here.

Our study “GABAergic changes in the thalamocortical circuit in Parkinson's disease” is now published online in Human Brain Mapping. In this study, we investigated the role of changes in GABA levels in the thalamocortical motor circuit in different clinical phenotypes of Parkinson’s disease. We found that motor cortex GABA levels were negatively correlated with severity of symptoms, both on and off medication. This leads to the conclusion that GABA plays a beneficial role in Parkinson’s disease. The paper is open access and can be downloaded here.

Jennifer Swart elegantly defended her thesis "To go or not to go" and received her doctoral degree cum laude. Congrats Jennifer!

Hanneke has been awarded one of the three Radboud Science Awards for the year 2018. Congrats Hanneke!

Mojtaba Rostami Kandroodi has joined the lab as a visiting PhD student! He will work with Hanneke on modelling individual differences in reversal learning. For more information, check out his personal page.

In this blogpost [NL], Annelies van Nuland writes about the Brain Awareness week in which neuroscientists from the Donders Institute visit middle schools all across the Netherlands.

Vanessa Scholz has joined the lab as a postdoctoral guest researcher! She will carrying out a large online study on motivational biases and how they relate to distinct transdiagnostic psychiatric symptom dimensions.

Annelies van Nuland has previously written a blogpost about how your morning coffee helps to wake you up, but how much coffee is too much?

We are very excited to be joined by Johannes Algermissen, starting his PhD with us on how we (mal)adaptively employ different decision strategies. For more information, check out his personal page!

Very proud to announce that Hanneke was awarded €800.000 for an NWO Vidi project to study adaptive decision-making under changing environmental constraints. Have a look below for a Dutch and English summary!

Check out this blogpost on Donders Wonders by Annelies van Nuland to find out how your morning coffee helps to wake you up.

In a previous blogpost, Annelies van Nuland described the changes associated with the development of Parkinson’s disease. In her new blogpost, she describes how patients can use treatment to decrease their symptoms. For more, click here [EN] or here [NL].