Category Archives: Research

Preparing images for a talk, I was using the great bioRender to grab some images of brains-in-heads in humans and mice. Putting them on my slides, I found the left-facing much more pleasant to look at. Why?

Although we’d all like academia to be a true meritocracy, ample research shows that implicit biases create significant hurdles to achieving diversity in our communities. Here is an overview of the data (showing both the extent to which gender biases cause problems in science, and the different factors that may be significant contributors) and possibleContinue reading “Gender bias and diversity in academia”

For the last eight years, I called myself a cognitive neuroscientist. Throughout undergrad and grad school, I spent my days finding out how humans make decisions based on the information they extract from the outside world, and what factors play a role in determining our choices. Half a year ago I started working with mice,Continue reading “Of men and mice: a cognitive neuroscientist in a biology lab”

I strongly believe in the value of openness and transparency, and I encourage the authors to make their data and analysis code publicly available. Over and above increasing the transparency and reproducibility of scientific findings as a whole, sharing data and code increases the visibility and impact of individual papers (McKiernan et al. 2016 eLife).Continue reading “How I start each paper review”

That’s it. After 4+ years, a good number of triumphs and vastly more failures, I’ve defended my PhD! For the occasion, I’d like to share a short piece about my experience as a PhD student that I originally wrote for a friend when she graduated. I recommend the original if you read Dutch. Enjoy. OrContinue reading “You can call me Dr. Urai now”

After four years of experimental design, data acquisition and analysis I just finished putting together everything into my PhD thesis. I did not find any templates that really worked for me (although classicthesis looks quite nice), so I put together my own set of random LaTex commands. I’m not a graphics designer but I’m quiteContinue reading “Thesis formatting in Latex”

Check out my answer to the question ‘does psychology need neuroscience?’, published in Spiegeloog magazine. If you don’t read Dutch, or are interested in hearing more about this topic, check out this episode of the UnsupervisedThinking podcast.

Three years after starting the project, two years after completing data collection and almost exactly one year after submitting the manuscript, the first paper of my PhD is now out! In this project, we investigated the relationship between pupil dilation, decision uncertainty and across-trial patterns of decisions. When making decisions about the world, each choiceContinue reading “Pupil dilation reflects decision uncertainty and alters choice patterns”

To visualise the topographical distribution of electric or magnetic brain activity on the head, FieldTrip uses a family of topoplot functions. There are several styles to choose from, which determine o.a. if contour lines will be plotted on top of the color image. Now, the default setting cfg.style = ‘both’ (with contour lines) or cfg.style = ‘straight’ (withoutContinue reading “Rasterised topoplots in FieldTrip”

I’m starting to explore fellowship programs to fund my future postdoctoral adventures.  Thanks to many on Twitters who responded to my request, here’s a list of the agencies and programs I’ve come across so far. Hivemind, what are some good fellowships to do an international (US) postdoc as a EU citizen? Or all they all country-specific? — Anne UraiContinue reading “Postdoctoral fellowship programmes”