Tobias Hauser has won the 2024 FENS EJN Young Investigator Prize, together with Sara Bizzotto. He will present receive the Prize and present his work at the 2024 FENS Forum in Vienna. Hoping to see you all there! More info on the prize: https://www.fens.org/news-activities/news/meet-the-laureates-of-the-2024-fens-ejn-awards
It’s our pleasure to announce that Tobias has been awarded a prestigious 2021 Philip Leverhulme Prize in Psychology in recognition of his fascinating work in decision making. He is planning to use this award to undertake novel research to understand spontaneous brain fluctuations and their impact on decision making. Read more here.
In collaboaration with the Harley Lab we are giving a workshop on computational modelling in development. The workshop provides an introduction and overview about what computational modelling is, how it can help developmental cognitive neuroscience research, and what are the good practices. It is targeted at researchers with little prior experience in computational modelling, using many examples and hands-on tutorials to provide an intuitive understanding of computational modelling. More information on: https://devcompsy.org/flux2021workshop/ If this sounds interesting and you’d like to understand computational modelling better, sign-up via the general FLUX virtual conference registration: https://fluxsociety.org/registration/
Conducting research experiments on web-based platforms have become common in recent years but some designs, especially tasks that involve sounds, have been slow in their online adaptation because of concerns of data quality. In our latest paper, we leveraged recent methods to increase sound presentation quality and tested the reliability of a selected array of commonly used emotional sound stimuli to evoke valence and arousal states online. We found good inter-rater and test-retest reliabilities, with results comparable to in-lab studies which demonstrate that affective sounds can be robustly utilized on web-based platforms. We hope that this will help enable the adaptation and development of new auditory paradigms for online experiments. More information can be found here:Seow TXF & Hauser TU (2021). Reliability of web-based affective auditory stimulus presentation. Behavior Research Methods. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-021-01643-0
It is our great pleasure to announce that Tobias has been named a FENS-Kavli Scholar for 2021. He will be joining a network of 30 Early- and Mid-career neuroscientists from 13 different countries to work together and shape the future of Neuroscience in Europe through scientific exchange, advocacy and outreach.
Last month, Tobias discussed in The Conversation how changes in the brain may explain why many mental health problems arise during adolescence. Have a read yourself and find out more about what brain changes happen during adolescents and how they can affect our mental health: https://theconversation.com/teenage-mental-health-how-growing-brains-could-explain-emerging-disorders-154007
Adolescents aspire for independence and are often accused of not following the advice of others. Here, we investigated metacognitive development and advice taking across childhood and adolescence. To do this, we created a new space-themed game where participants made simple decisions about the numbers of, for example blue versus yellow, aliens there were on a planet. Participants were also given advice by a helpful ‘space advisor’ and could decide whether to stick with or switch their original decision. We found that adolescents, compared with children, had better metacognitive skills in that they were better able to intuit when they had made a good decision. This metacognitive skill allowed them to better resist misleading advice from others. ‘I know better, and I know I know better!’. More information can be found here:Moses-Payne ME, Habicht J, Bowler A, Steinbeis N & Hauser TU (2021). I know better! Emerging metacognition allows adolescents to ignore false advice. Developmental Science
We had the pleasure to talk about the brain and our research in Exploring By The Seat Of Your Pants YouTube channel that brings science into the classroom. Check out Tobias talking about Studying your Brain with the Smartphone and learn fun facts about the brain, how the brain changes during development and how we study the brain. He also talks about our new smartphone app Brain Explorer that everyone around the world can play and help us to understand the brain even better.
In our recent paper, we are investigating how information gathering changes over childhood and adolescence. We found that children gathered substantially more information before making a decision, but only if it came at no extra costs for sampling information. Using further computational modelling we showed that this effect was driven by a later emergence of subjective sampling costs for gathering information. These findings help us to understand how such cognitive functions develop, and how different information gathering impairments arise in adolescence-related psychiatric disorders. More information can be found here:Bowler A, Habicht J, Moses-Payne ME, Steinbeis N, Moutoussis M & Hauser TU (2021). Children perform extensive information gathering when it is not costly. Cognition 104535
We are looking for a new PostDoc to join our team to undertake exciting new research. You would be working on understanding the neural and computational mechanisms underlying obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) using a combination of computational modelling, neuroimaging, pharmacology and smartphone-based data collection. If this sounds inspiring and you would like to know more, check out the details here.
