"My thesis in 180 seconds" competition of UCLouvain was held on 21th March. Participants had 3 minutes to popularize their thesis and convince the public with a single illustration. Emmanuelle Wilhelm won the local selection of UCLouvain for the "3 Minute Thesis", the English version of the competition. Her video will be sent to the Coïmbra group, which will select the winners for its international final.
Congratulations to Emmanuelle for this remarkable performance!
Julie was invited to give a talk in the 8th CiNet Conference in Osaka, Japan (March 7 ‒ 9, 2023) Beyond Motor Control: Bridging the gap between action and perception. The goal of the 8th CiNet Conference is to bring together cognitive and systems neuroscientists who study motor control, perception, and decision-making to share and discuss the latest findings and future directions, with the aim of bridging the gap between research on motor control and perception/decision-making.
Very happy to present our work at this great conference chaired by Nobuhiro Hagura!
Congratulations to Su who got a postdoctoral grant from the Belgian Fonds Spéciaux de Recherche (FSR) involving 2 years of funding.
The goal of her research project is to explore the hypothesis that the co-regulation between decision urgency and movement vigor arises from influences originating in subcortical structures, such as the arousal system and basal ganglia (BG) circuitry. Specifically, the contribution of the arousal system will be tested by means of transcutaneous Vagus Nerve Stimulation, while the role of the BG circuitry will be addressed through pharmacological manipulations, with endpoint measures obtained at the level of behavior, electroencephalography & pupillometry. This work is relevant for fundamental neuroscience and also for neurology, as it will help better understand the neural source of decision urgency/impulsivity and the nature of the link that connects this to motor-related aspects of behavior, specifically the vigor of movements.
Congratulations to Pierre who successfully defended his PhD !
On the 7th of February, Pierre successfully defended his PhD entitled "Mechanisms underlying reinforcement learning of motor skills". Pierre performed this work jointly between the CoActions lab and the lab of Prof. Friedhelm Hummel at EPFL, in Switzerland. His PhD work investigated the involvement of reinforcement learning processes during the acquisition and retention of new motor skills with behavioural appraches, as well as non-invasive brain stimulation and fMRI. Pierre is now a post-doc at EPFL where he works on temporal interference stimulation and reinforcement learning.
