Time: 13.30 -14.30h
Place: 5A42
Speaker: Dr. Christian Tudorache | Developmental and Educational Psychology

Personality disorders are associated with maladaptive stress-coping strategies, and coping strategies may in turn shape symptom expression and disease course. Risk-taking behaviour is relevant to both: it is an altered symptom of personality disorders and a trait of stress coping styles, inter-individual differences in behavioural and physiological responses to stressors that are consistent over time and across contexts. 

This presentation examines the mechanistic link between stress coping and biological clock function, using zebrafish (Danio rerio) as a translational model. Combining behavioural assays for risk taking (emergence test) and aggressiveness (mirror image stimulation) with exposure to netting stress, we show that risk taking is a strong predictor of coping style, forming a behavioural syndrome with proactive and reactive extremes. Proactive fish recover quickly from acute stress, whereas reactive fish show prolonged recovery and, under chronic stress, allostatic overload with a baseline shift. Transcriptomic (RNAseq) analyses reveal coping-style-specific gene expression profiles, and physiological (qPCR, endocrine) measurements show that proactive individuals display robust circadian oscillations in clock-gene expression, cortisol, and melatonin, while reactive individuals show weak or absent rhythms with the same pattern across levels of biological organisation. Accordingly, proactive animals anticipate the light–dark cycle, whereas reactive animals respond only to immediate light changes. Clock-enhancing molecules (CEMs) rescue the reactive phenotype: they restore rhythmic diel activity in lines selected for risk-taking behaviour and normalise the anxiety-like response in a dark-challenge. Together, these results point to a syndromic relationship between clock function and stress coping, with potential therapeutic implications for personality-disorder-related risk-taking behaviour. 

Time: 11.00 -12.00h
Place: SA09

Organized on a monthly basis and open to all colleagues within the institute, these informal gatherings provide a low-threshold space for reflection, discussion, and knowledge exchange on topics related to responsibleresearch practices and research culture. Discussions are intentionally broad and participant-driven. Past themes have ranged from: knowing where to go with (confidential) research integrity issues, the responsible use of artificial intelligence in research, questions surrounding transparency in publishing, diverse academic career profiles, knowledge security, and experiences with (posthumous) authorship.

If you like to propose a topic for discussion upfront, or if you’d like someone to raise it for you (with or without identifying yourself), feel free to let a member of the ResearchCommittee know (or contact the chair, Anna van ’t Veer, or the secretary, Thaddeus Bergé, directly). 

Time: 13.30 -14.30h
Place: SA09
Speaker: Surya Gayet| Utrecht University

When a camera takes a snapshot of the world, processing of every pixel draws on an equal amount of resources. When we look at the world, however, different locations or objects compete for representation in visual cortex. And the outcome of this perceptual competition is vital, because it influences all subsequent cognitive processes that depend on incoming sensory information. In this talk, I will present a research line in which we track perceptual competition continuously, using a non-invasive “brain-tagging” technique: EEG-based Rapid Invisible Frequency Tagging (RIFT). RIFT operates by flickering multiple locations on a display at distinct frequencies above the flicker-fusion threshold, rendering the modulation perceptually invisible. Frequency-specific (and thus location-specific) neural responses are then recovered from the EEG signal. Fluctuations in these responses—in the absence of eye movements or stimulus changes—provide a direct measure of the attentional resources allocated to each tagged location.Using this technique, we demonstrate how expectations, salient events, and task goals dynamically modulate the encoding of sensory information over time.