Steve Mayhew with his certificate
Dr Steve Mayhew with his certificate

Dr Steve Mayhew, Birmingham Fellow in the School of Psychology, received the Neuroimage Editor's Choice Award in July for a paper investigating brain activity fluctuations.

In response to sensory stimulation some areas of the human brain turn on and others turn off. Exactly why regions turn off remains unknown although researchers expect it happens to help conserve processing resources.

Dr Mayhew’s paper explores this by studying how the size of these activation and deactivation responses relate to each other. The research team found that the response of specific brain regions is dominated by common activity that occurs globally across the whole brain, obscuring the real relationship between activation and deactivation. Future work to establish the meaning of these fluctuations in activity is very important for understanding the link between brain function and behaviour.

The Neuroimage Editor’s Choice Award 2016 was given for the best paper (as judged by the journal’s Editors) published this year in the journal Neuroimage. Steve was presented with a certificate during the annual conference of the Organisation of Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) in Geneva in July.