Does the ageing brain become ‘noisier’?

By Fenying Zang

Older people often respond less consistently when making decisions. But does a similar behavioural pattern occur in other species, and what happens to the activity of individual neurons as the brain ages? Researchers at Leiden University, working with collaborators from the International Brain Laboratory (IBL) and University of California, Los Angeles, analysed the activity of more than 18,000 neurons in mice spanning early adulthood to old age. They found that older mice performed slightly worse and had more variable response times in a visual decision-making task. At the neural level, ageing was associated with higher firing rates across many recorded regions and greater variability after a visual stimulus appeared—but the patterns depended on the brain region and the time at which neural activity was measured.

Image adapted from Zang et al. (2026), CC BY 4.0. Task schematic adapted from International Brain Laboratory et al. (2025), CC BY 4.0.
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Connecting Neural Data and Computational Models at CCNSS 2026

By Fenying Zang

When I arrived at the Computational and Cognitive Neuroscience Summer School in Suzhou, I felt both excited and curious. My PhD project has largely focused on analysing neural recordings and examining how neural activity varies across trials. While this empirical perspective has allowed me to identify patterns in data, I had become increasingly interested in how theoretical and computational approaches might help explain the phenomena behind those patterns. Exploring this direction felt particularly important as I entered the final year of my PhD and began to think more carefully about how I wanted to develop as a researcher. I hoped that the summer school would bring me closer to theoretical neuroscience and allow me to meet researchers who approached the brain using very different questions and methods.

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Anne receives Heineken Young Scientists Award for Social Sciences

Anne Urai (1988), assistant professor of cognitive neuroscience at Leiden University, receives theHeineken Young Scientists Award for Social Sciences 2026. In her laboratory, she investigates through controlled experiments how the brain processes information and how decisions are made. The jury is impressed by the originality and impact of her work and expects that she will make a lasting contribution to her field and beyond.

Photo by Bram Belloni
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SBDM in Paris

Several lab members attended the Society for the Biology of Decision-Making meeting in Paris (https://sbdm2026.sciencesconf.org/). We kicked off with a satellite event, co-organised with the Palminteri lab, focusing on the intersection of cognitive science and sustainability: https://magdalenasabat.github.io/pre-sbdm. During the main meeting, Isabelle presented her DisRNN work, Robin his work on confidence fluctuations (preprint), and Anne gave a talk on dynamical systems models of arousal-driven state transitions (preprint).

Curious kids learn about the brain

Anne visited a group of curious 4-6 year olds (pre-K, kleuterklas in Dutch) to talk brains! They knew the brain helps you think and feel (for instance when you’re hungry) and that it’s in the head. We learned that there are two big parts of the brain connected by a little bridge to talk with each other; that there are many parts of the brain that do slightly different things, and we compared the brain of a human with that of a mouse.

Everyone went home with a DIY brain hat (recommended for curious scientists of all ages).