Can humans & animals really use internal maps to take shortcuts? Tolman famously said yes - based largely on his Sunburst maze. Our new review & meta-analysis suggests evidence is far weaker than you might think. 🧵👇 doi.org/10.1111/ejn.... @uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social @ejneuroscience.bsky.social

We are hiring a new Ph. D. student on neuroimaging and/or computational modeling on motivation and emotion. Tübingen is a great place to pursue work on these topics!! uni-tuebingen.de/fakultaeten/...

Your stomach called – your striatum picked up! But does this actually happen in humans? Using simultaneous dopamine PET/fMRI, we show that the gut hormone ghrelin helps the brain adjust motivation to current metabolic need. Here’s what we found👇 Preprint: shorturl.at/pq4A3 #neuroskyence #🩺

New paper! Associative learning mechanisms are often overlooked in studies of "complex" cognitive processes. Here, we examined how they participate in humans' and pigeons' task-switching. psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-... (see also osf.io/3265r/files/... for the accepted version!)

New article by @jaquent.bsky.social and co: Graded encoding of spatial novelty scales in the human brain www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1/4 Cockatoos are winning the trash can war against Australians Human motivation to protect them falls five times faster than cockatoos' motivation to open them, and increasing protections makes cockatoos better at it. (paper) royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

Job alert! Fully funded PhD position on the link between curiosity and cognition in lemurs at our long-term field site Kirindy Forest in Madagascar @kirindy.bsky.social & @primatenzentrum.bsky.social. This project is part of @rtg2906-curiosity.bsky.social. Apply here: www.dpz.eu

New paper! Brains stretch representations along task-relevant dimensions. Spike timing is important. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

A beautiful summary of our paper! Thank you @neurosock.bsky.social

New preprint alert! Cognitive maps are flexible, dynamic, (re)constructed representations #psychscisky #neuroskyence #cognition #philsky 🧪

Stress drives the hippocampus to prioritize statistical prediction over episodic encoding https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.25.683838v1

🚀 New paper! We just took a major step in understanding how architecture shapes cognition. Our paper shows that something as simple as corners in rooms or corridors can shift canonical spatial attention cueing costs. Key method? Mobile Brain/Body Imaging combined with VR! bit.ly/47m6ssV

World's largest rays may be diving to extreme depths to build mental maps of vast oceans

The work with bats on barren, 7-acre Latham Island was Nachum Ulanovsky’s most complex undertaking yet. By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/neuroetholog...

So excited that our first major empirical @themanybirds.bsky.social paper is now out in @plosbiology.org! Leading this big team science project, with our excellent core leadership team, is a labour of love for me, delighted to see our hard work over the past 4 years has reached this milestone!

Me too! 😊 Excited to see what we find -- thanks so much to @marinabazhydai.bsky.social, @pci-regreports.bsky.social, and the reviewers for their thoughtful handing of the process.

Please repost! We're looking for a PhD student to join us on a project exploring how ADHD is linked to greater curiosity. The PhD student will be based across Cardiff University and the University of Bath working with @ggoclowska.bsky.social , Kate Langley, and me as part of a collaborative team.

For all who didn't make it to the Cheltenham Science Festival this year, here is the recent BBC Radio 4 All in the Mind episode on the Psychology of Curiosity. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Interested in a study to help us understand coping strategies in autism, ADHD, Learning Disability, Social Anxiety, Depression, and Tic Disorder? 🧵 👇 For more information about this study: www.azrieli-anc.com/coping-study...

Please repost! Our deadline is fast approaching for a 20-month postdoc position leading an fMRI project on the neurodevelopment of metacognition and curiosity. Join a great lab with fantastic collaborators! 🙂

If you're looking for a postdoc, come join us at Cardiff!! I can vouch for the research team :)

Interesting commentary in @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social, arguing that we need to be careful not to always assume that rodents prefer novelty: www.cell.com/trends/neuro... 🧠📈 🧪

This is a great (and accessible) summary of our latest @commspsychol.bsky.social paper, which examines the link between curiosity, spatial exploration, and memory within virtual environments. www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/view/29... Paper link 👉🏻: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

"The relationships between curiosity and wellbeing: a systematic review" Alisa Priemysheva thoroughly reviewed the literature to synthesise our current knowledge of how different types of curiosity might affect wellbeing. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Now that it's preregistered, super excited to get started on this project! Using a yoked design, @danlucen.bsky.social, @mjgruber.bsky.social and I will ask whether the benefits of curiosity are direct, or dependent on the ability to actively engage in curiosity-guided exploration.