Category Archives: Research

This academic year, Anne will serve as the chair of the Young Academy Leiden, joined in the leadership team by Eduard Schmidt as vice-chair and Marlieke Muilwijk as project manager.

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, analysedContinue reading “Does the ageing brain become ‘noisier’?”

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 becomeContinue reading “Connecting Neural Data and Computational Models at CCNSS 2026”

Anne explains the neuroscience of decision-making. In Dutch.

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 willContinue reading “Anne receives Heineken Young Scientists Award for Social Sciences”

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 AnneContinue reading “SBDM in Paris”

For the 2026 course Psychology of the Climate Crisis, students worked on creative projects to communicate insights they learned to a broader public. Enjoy!

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 withContinue reading “Curious kids learn about the brain”

We are happy to welcome Magdalena Sabat as a postdoc in the lab. She will investigate early warning signals of social tipping points, jointly supervised by Anne and Jan Willem Bolderdijk at the University of Amsterdam. We kicked off Magdalena’s start with several days of brainstorming with an amazing group of collaborators. Welcome!