Social & Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

I am a psychologist (MA, Eötvös Lorand University, Hungary) and cognitive scientist (Phd, Central European University, Vienna) by degree. During my Phd I investigated spontaneous theory of mind abilities of human adults, using behavioural and eyetracking methods. Besides this topic, I am also interested in how people represent possibilities, what effect uncertainty has on social interactions, and what enables us, humans to function flexibly and quickly adapt to changes in the social world. I am interested in these questions not only in typically developing adults, but also in adolescents and in atypical populations. I love books, puns and I find it important to raise voice against social injustice.

Email: fogd.dora@gmail.com

Hi,

While I was doing my PhD at Ghent University, I investigated how we understand, process and implement advice or instruction depending on the social characteristics of the person giving it to us. Here, I developed novel manipulations of trustworthiness, for example working with deep fakes, and tested their influence in different task contexts (e.g., value-based, perceptual decision making, …). As a postdoc, I’ll be focusing on social learning and advice implementation in neurotypical and atypical populations. Besides my academic interests, I enjoy hiking, reading comics, playing music and badminton.

If you are interested in collaborating or an internship, feel free to contact me.

Email: Mathias.VanderBiest@UGent.be

I hold an M.Sc. in General Psychology (2021, South China Normal University) and am currently a Ph.D. student at Ghent University under the supervision of Prof. Lara Bardi. My academic journey is shaped by a blend of art and science — prior to neuroscience, I studied journalism and documentary filmmaking, where I developed a deep interest in understanding society through individual narratives. My M.Sc. research focused on how the brain processes social dominance information and its impact on decision-making, using behavioral methods, digit-tracking, EEG, and intranasal oxytocin. In my Ph.D., I use fMRI and eye-tracking to study how environmental cues influence behavior and how the motor system supports cue-triggered decisions.

Overall, my work explores how we perceive social hierarchy and how the environment shapes our actions. I am enthusiastic about integrating narrativization via my camera with scientific inquiry to better understand ourselves and the way we navigate our social world. I am also a co-founder of NeuroNarratives — an art-science residency initiative.

Email: yulong.huang@ugent.be

I hold a double degree in Cognitive Processes Psychology (2022) from the University of Campania L. Vanvitelli and the University of Lille. During my master’s studies and Erasmus traineeship, I explored the relationship between individual cognition and social interaction. Currently, as a PhD student, my research focuses on how social interaction affects individual cognition, particularly how perspective-taking influences object perception. To investigate these processes, I use various methods such as EEG and fMRI.  

Email: MariaChiara.Diana@UGent.be

I am a PhD candidate in Psychology and Social Neuroscience at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” supervised by Matteo Candidi and Alessio Avenanti. My research focuses on the neural mechanisms underlying mirror phenomena, with a particular interest in the role of frontoparietal circuits investigated through non-invasive brain stimulation.

I graduated in Psychology (B.Sc.) and obtained an MSc in Neuroscience and Neuropsychological Rehabilitation at the University of Bologna, where I also completed a post-graduate research internship. During my PhD, I have published studies using cortico-cortical paired associative stimulation (ccPAS) to disentangle the contributions of premotor–motor pathways to imitation, and I am currently conducting event-related interfering TMS experiments to investigate the causal role of frontal (PMv, SMA) and parietal (IPL, SPL) regions in automatic and voluntary imitation.

I have presented my research at international conferences, including ESCAN (Ghent, 2024) and the International Brain Stimulation Conference (Kobe, 2025). I have also been invited to give lectures on non-invasive brain stimulation methods in academic courses at the University of Bologna and the Maderna Conservatory. My technical expertise includes different types of TMS protocols (i.e., rTMS, dual-coil TMS, ccPAS) and the analysis of physiological recordings (i.e., EMG, EEG).

Email: naomi.bevacqua@ugent.be