Centre for Human Brain Health, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham
Selma awarded research culture award
Selma has been awarded the Excellence in Enhancing Research Culture Award for an early career researcher, at the University of Birmingham's School of Psychology Awards 2025.​
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July 2025
Matt nominated for the Josiah Mason Award
Matt has been nominated for a University of Birmingham Founders' Award 2025 - the Josiah Mason Award for Academic Advancement. As part of this, a short video was created about his research, which is available here.​
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June 2025
Zhilin awarded runner up for research excellence award
Zhilin was awarded runner up for the Excellence in Discovery Science Award for an Early-Career Researcher from the School of Psychology, for his PLOS Biology paper titled "Dorsomedial and ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions differentially impact social influence and temporal discounting".​
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June 2025
Matt awarded runner up for research culture award
Matt was awarded runner up for the School of Psychology's Research Culture Award for a mid-career researcher.​
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June 2025
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RLDM conference 2025
Emma and Selma attended the Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making conference in Dublin.
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June 2025
Jamie publishes his first PhD paper​​
​Jamie has published his first PhD paper, "Dopamine boosts motivation for prosocial effort in Parkinson’s disease" in Journal of Neuroscience.
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January 2025
Society for Neuroeconomics conference 2024​​
Members of the lab attended the Society for Neuroeconomics conference (SNE 2024) in Portugal and presented posters on their current research.
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October 2024
A new member joins the lab!​​
Charley is a research assistant at the lab.
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August 2024
Computational Social Cognition Summer School 2024
in Birmingham!
​The Birmingham-Leiden Summer School on using computational modelling in psychological and neuroscience research took place at the University of Birmingham. Over the course of 3 days, it featured numerous lectures, keynote talks, tutorials, group projects, and social events, with more than 70 students participating from around the world.
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July 2024
A new member joins the lab!​​
Hikaru is a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the MSN lab funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
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July 2024
Control Processes Conference 2024 in Birmingham!
Matt was part of the organising committee from the CHBH for Control Processes 2024, which took place at the Edgbaston Park Hotel, University of Birmingham, from May 10th to 12th.
The conference featured brilliant talks and discussions by noted researchers in the field.
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May 2024
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A new member joins the lab!​​
Meijia is a postdoctoral fellow at the MSN lab.
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April 2024
Emma presents a poster at a conference in Janelia!
Emma presents her work on how "Explore/exploit trade-off drives variation in patch foraging decisions" at the 'Bridging Diverse Perspectives on the Mechanistic Basis of Foraging' conference in Janelia.
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February 2024
A new member joins the lab!​​
Kübra is a research associate jointly working with Matthew Apps and Lei Zhang.
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November 2023
The Lab attends a conference in Lyon!
Members of the lab attended the International conference on Motivational and Cognitive Control (MCC 2023) in Lyon, France. Dr. Matthew Apps gave a talk on the "Computational mechanisms of switching effort from cost to benefit in the medial frontal cortex." Other members of the lab presented posters on their current studies.
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October 2023
Lab away day!
Members of the MSN lab and the Social Decision Neuroscience lab travelled to Corpus Christi College, Oxford for a joint lab retreat. The activity of the day was called 'Empathy for Pain: Designing somebody else's next project', for which lab members were paired to design each other's next experiment. This was followed by a fun-filled science quiz.
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September 2023
Two new members joins the lab!​​
Selma Lugtmeijer is a postdoctoral fellow and Nikita Mehta is a research assistant at the MSN lab.
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August 2023
MSN lab receives the BBSRC Pioneer Award!
The lab was awarded a BBSRC Pioneer Award of £200k to examine the mechanisms underlying fatigue using spinal fMRI.
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July 2023
Virtual seminar on neural and theoretical mechanisms of foraging
Matt and Aaron Bornstein deliver a virtual seminar on foraging behaviour as part of the Future of Foraging Seminar Series.
To see the talk, click here
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May 2023
Matt awarded Wellcome Discovery Award alongside researchers from Oxford University!
In collaboration with Professors Masud Husain, Catherine Harmer and Simon Little (University of Oxford), Matt was awarded the 7 year Wellcome Discovery Award, to further research into brain mechanisms underlying motivation and apathy.
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March 2023
Matt receives an ERC grant!
Matt was awarded 5-year Є2m European Research Council Consolidator grant to examine the psychological, computational and neural mechanisms of the effort paradox.
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February 2023
Matt receives a Jacob Foundations Fellowship!
​Matt was awarded a Jacobs Foundation Fellowship to examine how the ability to work towards deadlines develops in children and adolescents
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February 2022
Two new members join the lab!
Zhilin Su and Jamie Talbot started their PhDs at MSN lab. Welcome!
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October 2022
Matt and Tanja receive the 2022 Society for Neuroeconomics paper award
The Society for Neuroeconomics awarded the authors for their paper “Neural and computational mechanisms of momentary fatigue and persistence in effort-based choice'”.
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September 2022
Matt, together with Patricia Lockwood and Steve Chang, receive the 2022 SANS Innovation Award
The Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (SANS) awarded the authors for their innovative paper “Is There a ‘Social’ Brain? Implementations and Algorithms”.
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August 2022