Brain & Cognition Lab

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The Brain & Cognition Lab is a scientific research group at Yale University headed by Kia Nobre. We use human neuroscience methods to investigate how the brain makes sense out of the energy signals in the world to construct cohesive and meaningful experience in our minds and guide adaptive behavior.

Members of the lab come from multiple generations and across the globe. We join our backgrounds and expertise to crack the mystery of human cognition. Our research is funded by national and international granting agencies, foundations, and philanthropy.

Find out more about us!

B&C x WTI story out!
This Yale news story captures well the spirit and the activities of the Wu Tsai Institute. Our research group feels lucky to be strongly linked to the WTI.  It’s easy to see why we benefit greatly. Read: https://news.yale.edu/2025/12/05/wu-tsai-institute-making-right-connections  
Kia attends Inauguration of LaMB at Oxford
The new Life & Mind Building at Oxford was officially inaugurated. The site was the previous home of the B&C lab, and Kia spent many many years helping the building come into existence. A lasting cameo of her efforts is …
🌟 Congratulations Sage!
November 14, 2025 – Sage Boettcher, former B&C grad student and postdoc, has been honored with the Early Group Leader – Rising Star Award from Women in Neuroscience UK. This well-deserved recognition celebrates Sage’s outstanding contributions to neuroscience and her …
📣 Hot off the press: New TiNs forum paper entitled “Disambiguating dimensions of external and internal brain processes”
October 22, 2025 – In the newest Forum article, Freek, Dani, and Kia propose a multilevel framework for conceptualising external and internal continua of brain processes. In their paper, they argue that rather than endpoints on a single scale, “external” …
Congratulations Dr. Williams!
October 17, 2025 – Congratulations to Gwen for submitting her DPhil thesis "Predicting What and When: How Feature-Temporal Regularities Influence Dynamic Visual Search”. Gwen’s opus shows how the brain picks up on consistent temporal structures to prioritise the pick-up of …
New preprint alert!
September 18, 2025 – Unlike typical laboratory tasks, in everyday life people decide for themselves when and how much to use their working memory (WM). In this new preprint, Levi, Kia, Dejan & collaborators explored whether people’s tendency to rely …