The PaL lab has published a new paper led by Dr Brónagh McCoy (now at King’s College London; see her webpage here: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/bronagh-mccoy  ), titled “The relationship between anxious traits and learning about changes in stochasticity and volatility ”  published in PLOS Computational Biology. Brónagh set out to tease apart two often-conflated sources of uncertainty, noise (stochasticity) and volatility (changes in contingency), using a clever orthogonal des

Thrilled to share our new paper in Nature Communications , led by the brilliant Dr. Nazia Jassim : Computational signatures of uncertainty are reflected in motor cortex excitatory neurochemistry . In this study, Nazia combined a beautifully designed learning task with hierarchical Bayesian modelling and 7T magnetic resonance spectroscopy to ask how individual differences in neurochemistry shape how we update our beliefs when the world changes. She found that higher excitatory

In September the PaL lab welcomed the arrival of our latest honourary member, baby Billy. We are all very proud of Nazia, and wish her a fantastic period of parental leave.

Thrilled to share our new paper, led by the brilliant Addison Billing : Maternal anxiety shapes prediction error responses in the infant brain , just out in Neurophotonics . This study marks a real methodological breakthrough using a new optical imaging approach, high-density diffuse optical tomography (HD-DOT) , we were able to measure medial prefrontal cortex function in awake, behaving infants for the first time . Addison combined HD-DOT with eye-tracking while 6–8-month-o

A huge congratulations to Tim Sandhu  and Calum Guinea , who both picked up awards at this year’s British Association of Psychopharmacology Conference  in Manchester! Tim won the President’s Poster Prize  for his fantastic work, “Baseline dependent effects of atomoxetine on aversive learning: a double-blind, placebo-controlled computational modelling study.” Calum was awarded the Hannah Steinberg BAP Conference Bursary  in recognition og his work titled, “Anxiety and Depressi

The PaL Lab made a strong showing at this year’s BAP meeting in Manchester, with an eclectic mix of posters and talks spanning computational psychiatry, neurochemistry, and development. Friederike Hedley  presented Transdiagnostic symptomatology amidst global uncertainty , using longitudinal network analyses to show how intolerance of uncertainty acts as a bridge linking anxiety, depression, and anhedonia when the world feels unpredictable. Nazia Jassim  shared new 7T MRS fin

I’m excited to announce that our lab is a co-lead partner in a newly awarded £1.8 million grant from Wellcome Trust, along with Amanda Sferruzzi‑Perri at University of Cambridge, to study how extreme heat exposure in pregnancy affects maternal and offspring mental health. You can read more about the project here: https://www.zero.cam.ac.uk/node/616 This interdisciplinary grant brings together climate science, developmental neuroscience, women's health and mental-health resear

Huge congratulations to Claudia Lage  and Tim Sandhu , who have both recently defended their PhD vivas! Claudia was examined by Greg Davis (Cambridge)  and Frankie Happe (KCL) , while Tim’s examiners were Paul Fletcher (Cambridge)  and Oliver Robinson (UCL) . Both passed with minor corrections, which are now all wrapped up, meaning they are officially Dr. Lage  and Dr. Sandhu ! Well done both, a brilliant achievement and very well deserved!

Our new paper, led by Nazia Jassim and Bronagh McCoy and published in Molecular Autism , takes on a long-standing question about how autistic and non-autistic people perceive structure in the world. The study, which was pre-registered and included nearly 500 participants, used a clever “Tetris-style” task to test whether people automatically combine fragmented visual pieces into coherent wholes. This so-called “Tetris effect” captures the brain’s natural drive for perceptua

And as the year comes to an end, we have much to celebrate. It’s been a busy and rather brilliant year for the PaL Lab, full of good science, new ideas, and the usual mix of chaos and caffeine. We wrapped things up with Christmas dinner at Tiffin Truck , featuring excellent thali, a few cocktails, and the annual dirty Secret Santa, which wasn’t too brutal this year. A lovely afternoon with a great team, and a fine way to see out 2024.

As the year’s meetings go, BAP 2024 was a lively one for the PaL Lab, with a strong line-up of talks and posters showcasing our work on uncertainty, learning, and affect. Tom Murray  explored how acute stress alters social learning under uncertainty, showing slower adaptation to social cues, especially in those high in compulsivity and social withdrawal. Bowen (Eddie) Xiao  examined volatility processing and valence biases across anxiety and autism in a preregistered online s

The PaL lab had a brilliant time at BAP 2023 in Manchester. We sent a good delegation presenting three posters and one short oral on a diverse range of projects from across the lab. Tim presented a poster on one of the major chapters from his PhD thesis looking at how learning under uncertainty differs across autism, anxiety and also task valence. This was Tim's first foray into the Hierarchical Gaussian Filter and there is much more to come - so watch this space. Calum prese

The University of Cambridge is to host one of the new Wellcome Mental Health Awards in the School of Biological Sciences, Department of Psychology. Becky - the Principal Investigator - will lead an interdisciplinary team of researchers in a six-year programme of research to study the mechanisms that underlie the treatments for common mental health conditions such as anxiety. Uncertainty is a powerful stressor. In uncertain situations people struggle to predict what will happ

This October we welcome Nazia to the lab officially in her new role as postdoc, on a prestigious Parke-Davis Fellowship. During her time in the lab Nazia will be continuing her exciting work on 7T MRS, sensorimotor expectations and learning. Congratulations Nazia!

Following a lot of disruption caused by COVID-19, the Prediction and Learning Lab are back with a bang - presenting four posters with new...

In July 2022 Becky attended the European Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (ESCAN) Society meeting in Vienna to give a keynote...

Nazia took her first in-person poster presentation to OHBM in Glasgow. She presented data from her 7T MRS study conducted as part of her PhD. She showed that that after a switch in probabalistic relationships, people high in autistic traits have difficulties updating expectations. She then linked the initial learning of probabalistic relationships, and their updating following reversal, to higher levels of glutamate in the motor cortex. This is an evolving piece of work and y