Interview with Anne Urai

‘Our brain is constantly making predictions’

Imagine you’re waiting on your bike at a traffic light when it turns green. Between the moment that the visual information reaches your eye and you start cycling, all kinds of things are happening in your brain. Anne Urai, assistant professor of cognitive neuroscience at Leiden University, investigates how our brain processes this type of information and uses it to make decisions.

In the past, cognitive scientists considered the brain to be like a passive camera that receives information and then processes it using a fixed algorithm. ‘We are increasingly moving away from that idea,’ says Urai. ‘Your brain is actually constantly making predictions. It takes various factors into account to determine how to deal with the incoming information. Take the example of the traffic light. If it’s raining and visibility is poor, you might need a bit more time to see what’s happening. Internal factors also play a role in your actions: Are you in a hurry? Are you tired? Did you hear about an accident that happened here last week?’

Moving dots
Urai takes real-world situations and translates them into controlled experiments in her laboratory. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), Urai and her colleagues record the brain’s magnetic activity while research participants play specially designed computer games. Through this process, Urai aims to answer two key questions: What information do you use to make a choice, and what strategy do you use to turn that information into an action? During the experiment, her focus includes what’s known as your choice history. ‘We observe which brain signals are influenced by the choices you made last time. For instance, we repeatedly showed people a cloud of moving dots. Subjects had to indicate whether they thought a larger proportion of the dots were moving to the left or to the right by clicking with their left or right hand.’

Interestingly, they observed two different brain signals in this experiment. ‘On the one hand we observed that after clicking a few times with your right hand, a signal was generated in the motor cortex that preceded the subsequent click with your other hand. In another area, the parietal cortex, we could see a signal that was actually stronger if you were about to make the same choice as before. That second signal was stronger in people who were more likely to repeat their choices. The balance between these factors varies from person to person. It is these differences that I would like to try to understand better.’

By taking a close look at these types of fundamental brain processes, Urai hopes to gain an improved understanding of how our brain processes information and what drives our decision-making behaviour. ‘I think it’s great how researchers in this field can use biology and experimental lab research to provide insight into major philosophical questions such as: What is free will? How do we make decisions, and how do those decisions shape us? And what is consciousness?’

Sustainability
A few years ago Urai realised that, in addition to answering these fundamental questions, she also wanted to contribute to today’s major societal challenges, such as climate change. In pursuit of that goal, she wrote articles about how neuroscientists can reduce the climate impact of their work. She also organised conferences where people did not have to fly in from all over the world, but instead gathered on their own continent to watch the livestream together. ‘The thing I’m proudest of is a manifesto that we wrote with the Green Young Academy,’ says Urai. ‘It sets out concrete goals for how knowledge institutions can take bigger steps towards sustainability. Almost all universities in the Netherlands have now signed the manifesto, and we are currently exploring how to implement changes − from what is available in the cafeteria and how the building is heated, to integrating the sustainability mindset into education and research.’

Urai’s interest in sustainability also resulted in a new research direction. She had been wondering how people make decisions when these don’t involve neutral visual information such as a traffic light, but daily choices made in a social context. To find out, she studies what’s known as social tipping points. ‘These are sudden shifts in behaviour that can occur when people align their choices with others. This creates a chain reaction of change. For example, if you see that more and more of your colleagues are choosing the vegetarian option at lunch, you might start doing it too.’

Social conventions
To investigate how such tipping points come about, she translates social interactions into group games in the laboratory. ‘For example, the participants are shown a photo of a person and have to come up with a name for them. What we see is that everyone does their own thing at first, but if two people both happen to call that person Mary, they are awarded a point. After that, a convention emerges: from now on that person is called Mary. In these types of experiments, you can bring about a change in norms by replacing some of the subjects with actors. They will try to change the convention by consistently calling the person in the photo Jane. A famous study shows that this almost always works if the actors make up more than 25% of the group. This 25% does depend on the group size, though, and whether there are social bubbles in the group, for example. Or on such factors as: Do the choice options affect the identity of the subjects, such as political preference?’

In the future, Urai wants to increasingly translate her lab research into behavioural change that is relevant to major issues in society, such as the shift towards more sustainable ways of living. ‘There are already many large-scale studies that use questionnaires to investigate how opinions, for example on topics like climate policy and behavioural change, evolve over a certain time period,’ she says. ‘In this context, I’m again curious about individual differences: why do some people stick to their habits, while others are much less likely to?’ With this information, Urai hopes to discover how different people react to specific types of information, and how to use this to encourage sustainable behaviour. ‘I hope that we can gain a better understanding of how our social norms can change fairly quickly when we work collectively to make it happen. This will allow us to abandon the idea that the world just is the way it is and always will be. That gives me hope for the future.’