BACN 2015 Young Scientist Poster Prize

This year’s British Association for Cognitive Neuroscience (BACN) Annual Conference showcased some of the latest neuroscience research; with more than 70 posters from both early career and leading researchers in the field of cognitive neuroscience. One of the stand-out posters was that of Sophie Sowden, whose latest research was awarded a Young Scientist Poster Prize, which was sponsored by Rogue Resolutions.

Sophie Sowden is an MRC funded researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London, under the expert supervision of Dr. Geoff Bird and Professor Francesca Happé. She completed her Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology at the University of Surrey, where she first started using brain stimulation (specifically Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) to investigate the neural mechanisms involved in human imitation (Sowden & Catmur, 2015); under the supervision of Dr. Caroline Catmur (now at King’s College London).

Sophie has now turned her attention to the neural basis of typical and atypical social behaviour, in particular how the ability to distinguish between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ (self-other control) may contribute to a range of social cognitive abilities. She has recently investigated how inconsistency between the opinions of the self and another impairs lie detection and by administering transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to the temporoparietal junction she was able to improve lie detection in these opinion inconsistent situations. This research has just been published in Current Biology (Sowden et al.,2015).

Sophie’s research is another example of great work that is being done by up and coming neuroscience talent and Rogue Resolutions is proud to support Sophie and her peers in this field.