ALPN Lab

ALPN Lab

The lab addresses the fundamental question of the “adaptive brain” by studying the cognitive, computational, and neurobiological basis of (social) learning and decision-making in health and disease (i.e. Computational Psychiatry).

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Christmas retreat

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We had our first Christmas retreat as a lab where we indulged in scientific exchange, drinks and pizza! We were joined by guest speakers Dr. Ali Khatibi and Dr. Wataru Toyokawa.

in2ScienceUK

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We enjoyed organizing and running our work experience placement with in2scienceUK with our wonderful students!

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Latest from the lab

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Aamir Sohail, PhD student

Aamir is a first-year MRC Advanced Interdisciplinary Methods (AIM) DTP PhD student. His research interests involve using a combination of behavioral tasks, computational modeling, and neuroimaging to understand social decision-making, and using this knowledge to inform the precision-based treatment of mental health disorders. He aims to use these methods to identify the neurocomputational mechanisms and associated brain regions affecting learning in social anxiety, and in a novel initiative, attempt to alleviate these changes using a mobile app-based cognitive therapy program.

Dr. Anne Saulin, Postdoctoral Fellow

Anne completed her PhD at the University of Würzburg. She is interested in the neural bases of prosocial behavior. By adopting a neuro-computational approach and applying mathematical modelling techniques, she wants to understand what neural and behavioral processes foster or hinder prosocial behavior. In this vein, she uses different neural (fMRI, EEG) and behavioral (mouse-tracking, experience sampling, reaction time experiments) methods.

Gwynnevere Suter, PhD student

Gwynnevere is a first year Psychology PhD student funded by the College of Live and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham. Her project focuses on identifying mechanistic relationships and differences between dissociation and psychosis. To do this, Gwynnevere uses self-monitoring memory tests, fMRI, and computational modelling across clinical and non-clinical groups. She is also a representative for the Psychology postgraduate research students at the university level and is working with Dr Emma Černis on a pilot randomised control trial of cognitive behavioural therapy for dissociation.

Kubra Fethiye Karatas, Research Assistant

Kübra is a research associate supervised by Prof. Matthew Apps and Dr. Lei Zhang. She completed a BSc in Psychology and Biology at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey, and holds an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Trento in Italy. She is interested in the neural mechanisms of social cognition and decision-making processes in health and neurodegeneration using computational models.

Dr. Lei Zhang, Principal Investigator

Lei is an Associate Professor directing the Adaptive Learning Psychology & Neuroscience (ALPN) Lab, at the Centre for Human Brain Health and Institute for Mental Health, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, UK. Lei was a Postdoc fellow in Social Decision Neuroscience at the SCAN-Unit, University of Vienna. Before that, he worked in the Gläscher Lab (PhD, summa cum laude, and 1-year postdoc) at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, and he also worked as a Roche intern for Scientific Exchange (RiSE), based in the Clinical Computational Neuroscience Group at Roche Innovation Center Basel, Switzerland.

publications

Conference 1

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Zhang, L., Kandil, F., Hilgetag, C.C., & Gläscher, J. (2019). "The causal role of temporoparietal junction in computing social influence in human decision-making." Cognitive Computational Neuroscience (CCN 2019)".
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Peer Reviewed 1

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Falck, J., Zhang, L., Raffington, L., Mohn, J.J., Triesch, J., Heim, C., Shing, Y.L. (2024). "Hippocampus and striatum show distinct contributions to longitudinal changes in value-based learning in middle childhood." eLife 12:RP89483.
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Peer Reviewed 10

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Zhao, Y., Zhang, L., Rütgen, M., Sladky, R., Lamm, C. (2021)."Neural dynamics between anterior insular cortex and right supramarginal gyrus dissociate genuine affect sharing from perceptual saliency of pretended pain." Elife. 10:e69994.
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Peer Reviewed 11

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Zhao, Y., Rütgen, M., Zhang, L., & Lamm, C. (2021). "Pharmacological fMRI provides evidence for opioidergic modulation of discrimination of facial pain expressions." Psychophysiology. e13717.
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Peer Reviewed 12

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Zhou, L., Zou, T., Zhang, L., Zhang, Y. Y., & Liang, Z.-Y. (2021)."“Carpe diem?”: Disjunction effect of incidental affect on intertemporal choice." Frontiers in Psychology. 5896.
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Peer Reviewed 13

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Crawley, D.*, Zhang, L.*, Emily, J., …, den Ouden, H., Loth, E., & the EU-AIMS LEAP group (2020)."Modeling cognitive flexibility in autism spectrum disorder and typical development reveals comparable developmental shifts in learning mechanisms." PLOS Biology. 18(10).
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Peer Reviewed 14

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Zhang, L., Gläscher, J. (2020)."A brain network supporting social influences in human decision-making." Science Advances. 6(34).
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Peer Reviewed 15

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Botvinik-Nezer, R., Holzmeister, F., Camerer, C. F., …, Zhang, L., …, Nichols T. E., Poldrack, R. A., Schonberg T. (2020). "Variability in the analysis of a single neuroimaging dataset by many teams." Nature.
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Peer Reviewed 16

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Zhang, L.*, Lengersdorff, L.*, Mikus, N., Gläscher, J., & Lamm, C. (2020)." Using reinforcement learning models in social neuroscience: frameworks, pitfalls, and suggestions of best practices." Social cognitive and affective neuroscience. 15(6).
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Peer Reviewed 17

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Bayer, J., Rusch, T., Zhang, L., Gläscher, J., & Sommer, T. (2020)."Dose-dependent effects of estrogen on prediction error related neural activity in the nucleus accumbens of healthy young women." Psychopharmacology. 237(3).
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Peer Reviewed 18

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Zhou, L., Li. AM., Zhang, L., Li, S., & Liang, ZY. (2019)."Similarity in processes of risky choice and intertemporal choice: The case of certainty effect and immediacy effect." Acta Psychologica Sinica. 51(3).
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Peer Reviewed 19

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Zhang, L., Redžepović, S., Rose, M., & Gläscher, J. (2018)."Zen and the Art of Making a Bayesian Espresso." Neuron. 98(6).
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Peer Reviewed 2

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Sohail, A., Zhang, L. (2024). "Informing the treatment of social anxiety disorder with computatioal and neuroimaging data." Psychoradiology.
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Peer Reviewed 20

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Hu, Y., He, L.*, Zhang, L.*, Wölk, T., Dreher, J. C., & Weber, B. (2018). "Spreading inequality: Neural computations underlying paying-it-forward reciprocity." Social cognitive and affective neuroscience. 13(6).
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Peer Reviewed 21

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Ahn, W.-Y., Haines, N., & Zhang, L. (2017)."Revealing neurocomputational mechanisms of reinforcement learning and decision-making with the hBayesDM package." Computational Psychiatry.
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Peer Reviewed 3

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Peng M., Duan Q., Yang X., Tang R., Zhang L., Zhang H.& Li, X. (2024). "The influence of social feedback on reward learning in the Iowa gambling task." Front. Psychol..
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Peer Reviewed 4

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Pan, Y., Vinding, M.C., Zhang, L., Lundqvist, D., Olsson, A. (2023). "A Brain-To-Brain Mechanism for Social Transmission of Threat Learning." Advanced Science.10(28):e2304037.
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Peer Reviewed 5

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Mitter, B., Zhang, L., Bauer, P., Baca, A., Tschan, H. (2023)."Modelling the relationship between load and repetitions to failure in resistance training: A Bayesian analysis." Eur J Sport Sci.23(7):1203-1213.
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Peer Reviewed 6

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Schmalz, X., Biurrun Manresa, J., & Zhang, L. (2021)."What Is a Bayes Factor?." Psychological Methods.
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Peer Reviewed 7

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Kutlikova, H.H.*, Zhang, L.*, Eisenegger, C., van Honk, J., & Lamm, C. (2022)."Testosterone eliminates strategic prosocial behavior." bioRxiv.
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Peer Reviewed 8

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Kreis, I., Zhang, L., Mittner, M., Syla, L., Lamm, C., & Pfuhl, G. (2020)."Aberrant uncertainty processing is linked to psychotic-like experiences, autistic traits and reflected in pupil dilation." OSFPreprints.
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Peer Reviewed 9

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Zhao, Y., Zhang, L., Rütgen, M., Sladky, R., & Lamm, C. (2022)."Effective connectivity reveals distinctive patterns in response to others’ genuine affective experience of disgust." NeuroImage. 119404.
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Preprint 1

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Sohail, A., Zhang, L. (2024). "Using large language models to facilitate academic work in psychological sciences".
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Preprint 2

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Zhang, L., Kandil, F., Zhao, K., Fu, X., Lamm, C., Hilgetag, C., Glascher, J. (2024). "A causal role of the human left temporoparietal junction in computing social influence during goal-directed learning".
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Preprint 3

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Steininger, M.O., White, M.P., Lengersdorff,L., Zhang,.L., Smalley,A.J., Kühn,S., Lamm, C. (2024). "Nature exposure induces hypoalgesia by acting on nociception-related neural processing".
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Preprint 4

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Su, Z., Garvert, M., Zhang, L., Manohar, S.G., Vogel, T.A., Thomas, L., … Lockwood, P. (2024). "Older adults are more susceptible to impulsive social influence.".
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Preprint 5

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Xu, T., Zhang, L., Zhou, F., Fu, K., Gan, X., ..., Becker, B.(2024). "Distinct neural computations scale the violation of expected reward and emotion in social transgression .".
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Preprint 6

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Wanke, P., Geng, H., Zhang, L., Fengler, A., Frank, M.J., Zhang, R., Chuan-Peng, H. (2022). "A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Bayesian Hierarchical Drift-Diffusion Modeling with dockerHDDM".
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Preprint 7

Published in , 1900

Recommended citation: Zhou, L.*, Zhang, L.*, Su, Y., & Liang, ZY. (2019)."Is zero void? Attentional mechanism of hidden-zero effect in risky decision-making." PsyArXiv.
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