Laboratory of Neuroeconomics

Profile

Dr Alicja Puścian
email: a.puscian@cent.uw.edu.pl
phone: +48 22 55 43xxx
office: 0x.xx
ORCID: 0000-0002-7029-1275
SCOPUS ID: 56147430400

The aim of the Laboratory of Neuroeconomics is to connect cutting-edge circuit-level neuroscience with human experimentation. It aims at understanding how social mechanisms shape the choices we make. This is where neuroscience meets behavioral economics, and theory meets practice. The lab pioneers novel approaches to analyzing social decision-making, combining real-time brain imaging, immersive virtual environments, and advanced animal behavioral studies in automated systems such as Eco-HAB®. The goal is not only to understand the brain in action, but to create tools that help anticipate and support decision-making in the real world.

Leader

Alicja Puścian is behavioural neurobiologist and her research work focuses on the relationship between the brain and behaviour, particularly in the context of emotions, motivation and social interaction, using knowledge from psychology, biology and behavioural analysis. She is currently involved in the BRAINCITY project, which investigates how social connections are encoded in the brain. During her doctoral studies at the Nencki Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, she designed and, together with colleagues, patented the Eco-HAB system for the automated assessment of social behaviour in laboratory animals under semi-natural conditions. The Eco-HAB, which was developed using knowledge from the fields of electronics, advanced computational methods and ecology, is now used in many laboratories in Europe and North America.

She has also worked as a visiting scientist at one of Switzerland’s leading research institutes, the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, and in the United States at Yale University, where she was awarded the Brown-Coxe Award for her research on the dynamics of changes in neural activity accompanying behavioural shaping as part of her postdoctoral fellowship.

Team

Leader
Alicja Puścian

Postdocs / Researchers
soon

PhD students
soon

Selected projects

Selected publications

• Winiarski M., Madecka A., Yadav A., Borowska J., Wołyniak M.R., Jędrzejewska-Szmek J., Kondrakiewicz L., Mankiewicz L., Chaturvedi M., Wójcik D.K., Turzyński K., Puścian A., Knapska E.
  Information sharing within a social network is key to behavioral flexibility—Lessons from mice tested under seminaturalistic conditions
  (2025) Science Advances , 11 (1), art. no. eadm7255
  DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adm7255
• Rydzanicz M., Kuzniewska B., Magnowska M., Wójtowicz T., Stawikowska A., Hojka A., Borsuk E., Meyza K., Gewartowska O., Gruchota J., Miłek J., Wardaszka P., Chojnicka I., Kondrakiewicz L., Dymkowska D., Puścian A., Knapska E., Dziembowski A., Płoski R., Dziembowska M.
  Mutation in the mitochondrial chaperone TRAP1 leads to autism with more severe symptoms in males
  (2024) EMBO Molecular Medicine, 16 (11), pp. 2976 – 3004
  DOI: 10.1038/s44321-024-00147-6
• Szewczyk L.M., Lipiec M.A., Liszewska E., Meyza K., Urban-Ciecko J., Kondrakiewicz L., Goncerzewicz A., Rafalko K., Krawczyk T.G., Bogaj K., Vainchtein I.D., Nakao-Inoue H., Puscian A., Knapska E., Sanders S.J., Jan Nowakowski T., Molofsky A.V., Wisniewska M.B.
  Astrocytic β-catenin signaling via TCF7L2 regulates synapse development and social behavior
  (2024) Molecular Psychiatry, 29 (1), pp. 57 – 73
  DOI: 10.1038/s41380-023-02281-y
• Chen X., Winiarski M., Puścian A., Knapska E., Walczak A.M., Mora T.
  Generalized Glauber Dynamics for Inference in Biology
  (2023) Physical Review X, 13 (4), art. no. 041053
  DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.13.041053
• Puścian A., Łęski S., Kasprowicz G., Winiarski M., Borowska J., Nikolaev T., Boguszewski P.M., Lipp H.-P., Knapska E.
  Eco-HAB as a fully automated and ecologically relevant assessment of social impairments in mouse models of autism
  (2016) eLife, 5 (OCTOBER2016), art. no. e19532
  DOI: 10.7554/eLife.19532

Contact

Dr Alicja Puścian
email: a.puscian@cent.uw.edu.pl
phone: +48 22 55 43xxx
office: 0x.xx