Out for a while but forgot to post it. Using pupil size as a proxy for arousal, we show that the inverted-U shaped arousal–performance curve (Yerkes-Dodson law) is not fixed, but can shift globally depending on neuromodulatory state (atomoxetine): arousal recalibration www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🚨The SCANN Lab @ UTA is hiring a postdoctoral researcher!🚨 Topics: 🧭 spatial navigation, 🧠 fMRI, 🎮 VR, 👵 cognitive aging. Start date: Nov 2025 (flexible). Salary: NIH levels. Details 👇

An amazing opportunity to work with a rising star in the field!

Call for papers on conflict adaptation across single- and multi-tasking paradigms in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory & Cognition The deadline for initial submissions is 1 October 2026.

Please RT 2 new positions in the lab as postdoc & PhD! Interested in stress, pain, or reward? This project has it all! We are a friendly but ambitious group. Oslo is a capital city on the fjord & bordered by forest, great urban & outdoors opportunities: 💃 ⛷️ 🚣 🎭 🎶 www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

Tough at Universities in the Sydney region right now. Consultants reign throughout

I haven't seen the original paper but glad to know now not to bother reading it!

This article is truly impressive, both for the significance of its findings and the enormous amount of work it represents! Briefly, it demonstrates that the gut-brain vagal axis exerts a considerable influence on dopamine-dependent reward-related processes... 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I heard about this the other day. Obviously seems problematic

How does the brain decide? 🧠 Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc. After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up. rdcu.be/eGUrv

Many shocking things about the last 24 hours; but the contrast between the Labour government’s response to peaceful protest against genocide, and its non-response to violent racist protest against liberal democracy, is high on the list.

It was reasonable not to anticipate that bipolar disorders might be a future indication. There is little compelling biology to link GLP-1R signalling to the therapy of this challenging disorder

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Jared Deighton, Vassilios N. Christopoulos, et al: Functional ultrasound imaging combined with machine learning for whole-brain analysis of drug-induced hemodynamic changes doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

Fabrizi, Lorenzo: Postdoc Opportunity in Neonatal Brain Imaging in London – Apply by 25 September

New paper! Different to my usual schtick concerning cognitive costs. We analysed differences in learning between depressed and healthy students and whether Pavlovian biases differed between them. We found mixed evidence... have a read! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Here's the link to their "stakeholder survey on the use of AI in grant assessment": www.surveymonkey.com/r/X7PY5GL

Notre Dame is hiring in Psychology! We have an open-rank, tenure/TT position in Cognitive Neuroscience: apply.interfolio.com/170229 Application deadline is soon (Sept. 15)

The brain's priors have been found! They were hiding everywhere: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... So if this is true for "simple" decisions, it should also be true for more complex ones, like, say, emotions, right?

Deadline for applications is 16th September!

Academics are under unrelenting pressure to accept the narrative of the inevitability of #generativeAI & to embrace it in teaching & learning. We resist - because it is ecologically destructive, ethically corrupt, & because it undermines the thinking abilities that make us both human & intelligent.

Sad day for peope who still believe brain areas are the primary organizational units of function in the brain. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Why are we having this conversation in 2025 ;(

Huge variability documented in how publishers respond when informed about a problematic body of work by a research group. www.jclinepi.com/article/S089... #publishers #retractions

👃 Smelling food too long can curb appetite A new study in mice shows that while brief food smells spark hunger, prolonged exposure makes them eat less. Brain circuits linking smell and appetite explain this effect. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #SciComm 🧪

We make predictions based on general knowledge and/or specific memories. Different brain areas are active when these distinct predictions are violated – and hippocampus selectively responds to prediction errors based on episodic memory. Cool work by @chrismbird.bsky.social @ayab.bsky.social et al!

Position open for a neuroimaging focused postdoc to come work with us in Sydney Feel free to get in touch for a chat if you have any questions about it :) usyd.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/USYD_E...

I gave a talk in 2009 about feature-based attention and a famous vision scientist asked how top down signals from PFC could possibly target the right sensory neurons. The best I could do was "uh, dunno". sunyoungp.bsky.social has a much more thoughtful answer journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

*Please read and share!* My NIH funds at UCLA were suspended last week. It's hard to find the words to describe the impact of these grant suspensions. I have felt speechless and heartbroken that people in my lab, my friends, colleagues, researchers, trainees, and undergrads 1/9

The R community is a generous bunch. How great is it that people doing a talk or running a workshop often create a website or github repo and give away their materials?? This workshop re survey data looks awesome. Thanks @statsteph.bsky.social @ivelasq3.bsky.social and Rebecca!

Quick reminder about this LIVE TidyTuesday #rstats hangout TOMORROW. Just an hour, about ~30 min of coding... join me! 5 min - say hi 5 mins - get data loaded in 5 min - help solve data loading problems 10 mins - explore data 5 min - check in 15 mins - flesh out one idea 15 min - report back

My first paper with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social is finally out in @natcomms.nature.com ! rdcu.be/eACGf TL;DR: asymmetric learning rates can be induced by shifts in tonic dopamine giving rise to pessimistic/optimistic biases in agents or animals undergoing reinforcement learning .

🚨 We’re hiring: Associate Professor/Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience 🧠 Lead pioneering imaging-informed cognitive neuroscience research 🌍 Open to international applicants | Visa sponsorship available 📍 Permanent, full-time, on-site 🔗 Apply now: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

It's a tax "raid". When you or I pay our income tax it's just a tax. But when a fabulously wealthy millionaire who refuses to contribute to the country whose public services they use (and yes, they use roads, defence, police etc) it's a "raid". www.ft.com/content/8882...

This is concerning. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

📣 New preprint 📣 The brain attenuates self-touch, but how does this unfold at the neural level before the touch? We used MEG to find out 🧠 👉👈

Finally out on Nat Comms 🚀 We show that an intrinsic motivational learning signal (information gain) is encoded through synergistic and higher-order functional brain interactions and is broadcast to prefrontal reward circuits.

Google Gemini doesn’t appear to be doing too well: ‘"I am a disgrace to this planet. I am a disgrace to this universe. I am a disgrace to all universes . . . I am a disgrace to all possible and impossible universes and all that is not a universe," the bot continued.’

"Haha, yeah the AI gets this basic stuff wrong, but it excels at summarizing tax law or complicated literature." MY BROTHER IN CHRIST IT'S JUST THAT YOU CAN'T TELL IN THOSE CASES BECAUSE YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND ENOUGH TAX LAW OR COMPLICATED LITERATURE WHY ARE WE EVEN DOING THIS

Postdoc alert. Laura Corbit in Toronto is hiring! Seen at Pavlovian conference.

Great to see @bradfield-neuro.bsky.social presenting recent work at Pavlovian conference in Sydney. Back-translation of our VMAC task and links to compulsivity in animals.

I am ridiculously excited about this! We made the cover!! (online-only... but still 😂). Love the philosophical twist to this Editorial at Nature Mental Health featuring our research.

🚨 PostDoc Opening 🚨 The lab of Klaus Oberauer is looking for a new postdoc, starting end of this/beginning next year. Research focus is #cognition, #workingmemory, #methods and #computationalmodeling or anything in that direction. I cannot highlight ENOUGH how great it is to work in this lab 🥰🤓

Imagine this at scale, unchecked: how is this not a fundamental threat to science? (Also, this is a perfect example of how irrational and ironic it is for large publishing companies to use “AI” to generate content that is of a much lower quality than the human-created content they already own.)

The good news? If there’s more than one mechanism driving compulsive behaviour, there’s likely more than one way to intervene! We talk about this in our @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social review @eikekofi.bsky.social @parnianrafei.bsky.social www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Before reading any article about microbiome biomarkers, see this: Zhang, J.,et al (2025). Identifying reproducible biomarkers for microbiome association studies requires thousands of sample sizes. Science Bulletin, 70(13), 2056–2060. doi.org/10.1016/j.sc...

Buffy is so old there were only 103 named elements, we’re at 118 now. (Yes I pause every show that has a periodic table to see if its period accurate)

I have been a bit wary of social media after a throwaway comment I posted underneath someone's post on LinkedIn was used in a guardian article as if I had been interviewed. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

In February 2024, I wrote Scientific Reports about a published meta-analysis claiming that mindfulness interventions affect neural plasticity, 'cementing the neuropsychological basis of mindfulness-based interventions'. The paper was retracted yesterday—here a little summary of the process.🧵

Internet search traffic for health information has dropped precipitously, the outlier drop vs all other categories, as chatbots and genAI take hold www.economist.com/business/202...

Nice Phd position on neuro&biofeedback: collaboration between donders Maastricht univ. vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastric...