News

Following our full accreditation from AAALAC International in November 2022, Dr Eleni Amaniti, Head of Neurobiological Research Facility at SWC, submitted an abstract to the international conference based on the improvements made to our programmes during the accreditation process.

Researchers in the Akrami Lab have revealed that recency bias in working memory naturally leads to central tendency bias, the phenomenon where people’s (and animals’) judgements are biased towards the average of previous observations. Their findings may hint at why the phenomenon is so ubiquitous.

Researchers at SWC have revealed how information from multiple senses is combined early in the cortex at the level of primary sensory areas. This multisensory integration was traditionally thought to be carried out by higher brain areas, with the primary sensory areas believed to only process single senses. These findings further challenge the long-held view that primary sensory cortical areas work in complete isolation.

We are delighted to announce that Professor Linda Wilbrecht has joined SWC as a Resident Scholar from January 2024 to June 2024. Linda's mechanistic work on basal ganglia function and how scarcity and uncertainty impact learning and decision making on a range of timescales nicely complement ongoing work at the SWC.

We are delighted to announce that Athena Akrami, SWC Group Leader, has been selected by the European Research Council (ERC) to receive a Consolidator Grant. The award of €2 million over five years will enable Athena to continue to pursue her long-term research endeavours.

Neuroscientists have uncovered a key brain area in rats that encodes the value of economic choices when faced with the uncertainty of a lottery. This is the first time the causal role of frontal and parietal cortex has been tested in economic decision-making. The findings provide a foundation for understanding the neurobiology of risky decisions.

The Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL is thrilled to announce that our Neurobiological Research Facility (NRF) team have been honoured at the Janet Wood Innovation Awards 2023.

We are excited to announce that Dr Tim Behrens has joined the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre as a Group Leader. The Behrens Lab at SWC will focus on how brains learn and represent knowledge about the world to enable flexible behaviours. Tim will also retain a portion of his group at the University of Oxford.

Neuroscientists have uncovered how exploratory actions enable animals to learn their spatial environment more efficiently. Their findings could help build better AI agents that can learn faster and require less experience.

Joint SWC/GCNU Group Leader Associate Professor Andrew Saxe has been named a 2023 Blavatnik Awards in the UK Finalist in Life Sciences. Dr Saxe was nominated for his fundamental contributions to the study of deep neural networks, which provide insight into representation learning—the method by which systems discover and organise knowledge—in artificial and natural systems.