And today in the @nytimes.com... I suggest that papers stop "suggesting a link" so that reporters stop suggesting that papers are suggesting to readers that there might be a causal relationship. They could alternatively suggest that correlations are sometimes caused by latent variables.

Curious about how scientists measure brain activity through EEG? Swipe to read more! ⚡️

Autistic people deserve much better, my latest www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/o...

Now might be a good time to repost this story about what scientists actually know about the complex causes of autism, and what's behind the increasing prevalence. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Studies reveal how risky play can benefit child development go.nature.com/42622Ez

🧵 New paper! We studied depression symptoms and goal-directed decisions under uncertainty @shiyiliang.bsky.social, with @evanrussek.bsky.social & @robbrutledge.bsky.social Surprisingly, we found that apathy–anhedonia was linked to enhanced goal-directed behavior. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Depression can affect the mind, body and daily life in ways you might not expect. 🧠Swipe to learn the key signs and symptoms – and why recognising them matters. #Depression #Mentalhealth #Research

A nice walkthrough on the limitations of generic slide titles and how assertive titles really help keep you on track and your audience following your desired narrative. My group can attest that I agree 💯% that slides should have a concrete summary statement as the title, with very few exceptions.

Eye movements are cheap, right? Not necessarily! 💰 In our review just out in @natrevpsychol.nature.com, Alex Schütz and I discuss the different costs associated with making an eye movement, how these costs affect behaviour, and the challenges of measuring this… rdcu.be/eAm69 #visionscience #vision

#neurojob #psychiatry @rcpsych.bsky.social @uclqsion.bsky.social @relmed.bsky.social

📢 Job announcement: Two (!) 3-year postdoc jobs in our lab at UCL 📢 🧠💫🔊 We are looking for postdocs interested in the abstract mechanisms underlying social cognition. Modelling, fMRI and non-invasive ultrasound, a new deep-brain stimulation method. Please RT www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

The RELMED team @docqhuys.bsky.social @hylu.bsky.social @muzhiwang.bsky.social is presenting our study at #CPC2025 in Tübingen, Germany this week! Come find us at Poster Session 3 on Wednesday 16th July at poster number 3.24 and 3.26!

This looks FANTASTIC. What an amazing thread! and paper! I am putting this on my class reading list forthwith.

V important meta-analysis doi.org/10.1001/jama...: Discontinuation symptoms 1 week post stopping antidepressants was below the threshold for clinically significant discontinuation syndrome. Later worse mood is likely depression relapse @jfhayes.bsky.social @sameerjauhar.bsky.social.

Binz et al. (in press, Nature) developed an LLM called Centaur that better predicts human responses in 159 of 160 behavioural experiments compared to existing cognitive models. See: arxiv.org/abs/2410.20268

New #rstats blog up! solomonkurz.netlify.app/blog/2025-07... This is the first in a brief series where we use {brms} to learn {Stan} code. Many thanks to @fusaroli.bsky.social and @stephenjwild.bsky.social for their helpful reviews.

Come visit us at stall 48 to learn more about RELMED and get a personally drawn postcard from our friendly lab robotic arm 🤖🦾

Comparing the value of perceived human versus AI-generated empathy #MLSky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Presenting our patient-friendly, reliable RL task battery today at #BAP2025 — come find our poster in the first session! We developed this battery for RELMED, a new clinical trial exploring how reinforcement learning contributes to antidepressant efficacy. @relmed.bsky.social @bapsych.bsky.social

Our new study published in TheLancetPsych! We found that pramipexole augmentation substantially reduced depressive symptoms in patients with treatment-resistant depression over 48 weeks of treatment. This is an important advance in how we treat depression! 1/6 www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Why do we go downstairs when we hear a scary noise at night? New #preprint by postdoc Kati Rothenhoefer shows how novelty seeking & explore-exploit decision making in #macaques resolves curiosity about whether choices will lead to appetitive or aversive outcomes. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint: How does Behavioral Activation help with anhedonia in depression? Our new study finds that early reductions in aversive Pavlovian Bias mediate symptom improvement - suggesting a specific cognitive mechanism in realistic treatment settings. Read more here: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

In our preprint "Limited evidence for reduced learning rate adaptation in anxious-depression, before or after treatment", led by @stephsuddell.bsky.social and Lili Zhang, we fail to find a robust association between anxious-depression and learning rate adaptation osf.io/preprints/ps...

RELMED.ac.uk is now open to recruitment. This @wellcometrust.bsky.social-funded study wellcome.org/research-fun... will ask whether reinforcement learning tasks are differentially sensitive to dopaminergic and serotonergic antidepressants.

🎉🥳 Finally!

Paper about UK-China cross cultural differences mentioned in this thread FINALLY published: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... 🎉🍾

Christian Volkmann and Subat Abulikemu's new analysis examining the relationship between depression and discontinuation symptoms after antidepressant discontinuation dx.doi.org/10.1007/s004... with excellent thread here: x.com/CVolkmannMD/.... Short summary: the details do matter.

Are AI companions hurting or helping us? Researchers are finding answers. https://go.nature.com/3RQEWwk

What drives human curiosity? Is it a need to balance stimulation — or something we learn over time? In our 🚨 new preprint, we show that learning reinforces curiosity, especially for related content. osf.io/9bw6j_v2 w/ Jane Mok, @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social , Caroline Marvin, Daphna Shohamy 🧵👇

In 100 days in office, US President Donald Trump has destabilized eight decades of government support for science. This has included terminating more than 1,000 grants in areas such as climate change, cancer, and HIV prevention. Will US science survive Trump 2.0? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Applying computational models of reinforcement learning can help to improve psychotherapeutic interventions by helping to identify the therapeutic mechanisms of change and identifying for whom therapies will be most effective. @yaelniv.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44...

A putative neural correlate of mood! One big (scandalous?) idea, simple analyses, and the STRONGEST brain/behavior correlation I've EVER seen (which is shocking, given that it's mood). Work with: You-Ping Yang, @catrinahacker.bsky.social and Veit Stuphorn. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🙌 Hot off the presses @natcomms.nature.com! We created a custom #Minecraft environment to study a long-standing puzzle in cognitive science: How do humans flexibly adapt their individual and social learning strategies in dynamic, realistic situations? Check it out 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵👇

Sometimes you need a specific version of a package 🤓 In these cases 📦 pak.r-lib.org comes in very handy #rstats #dataviz #phd

Nature research paper: Towards accurate differential diagnosis with large language models https://go.nature.com/4cqHFWz

Have you also tried this? No subtitle or theme element needed ```r scale_colour_manual( values = c(setosa = "#93263E", virginica = "#3947A4", versicolor = "#C6A634"), guide = guide_marquee("{.setosa *I. setosa*} - {.versicolor *I. versicolor*} - {.virginica *I. virginica*}") ) ```

Nature research paper: Mastering diverse control tasks through world models https://go.nature.com/3YigkQB

Many parents are concerned that teenagers are spending more time on their phones and less time socializing directly https://go.nature.com/4lc0cKb

Wow…

New research suggests that there is no reputational penalty for shared first authorships, even for the person named second https://go.nature.com/4l3qtdS

getting this paper published was a bit painful but I am proud of it: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... We use deep RL to find mechanisms that help (real) people sustain the commons. Well done to Raphael Koster and Miruna Pislar (not on BlueSky). non-paywalled version on arxiv.

Very exciting new paper in @nature.com exposing how human PFC supports basis functions for social decision-making - led by @uclpals.bsky.social colleague and MetaLab member @mkwittmann.bsky.social Congratulations!

The UCL Computational Psychiatry Prize is for UCL early career researchers who want to apply theory to clinical problems. It starts with a speed dating event where clinicians and theoreticians meet to form interdisciplinary teams. acplab.org/2025/03/03/u...

New preprint! In arxiv.org/abs/2502.20349 “Naturalistic Computational Cognitive Science: Towards generalizable models and theories that capture the full range of natural behavior” we synthesize AI & cognitive science works to a perspective on seeking generalizable understanding of cognition. Thread:

New paper led by the unstoppable @qingtianmi.bsky.social. We study how people learn a task that involves combining multiple sources of information. We work out which curricula work best, build a model, and use it to successfully discover new curricula. enjoy! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Latest from the Nature Podcast 🔊 Racist ratings linger in five-star systems — a thumbs up could fix that https://go.nature.com/42WOU65

@lionelhenry.bsky.social and I are so excited to finally announce Air - an extremely fast R code formatter! 🎉 With Air, you'll never need to worry about styling your #rstats code ever again. All you need to do is save, and Air takes care of the rest. www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/02...

Check out our new work from Jennifer Senta, with Sonia Bishop, looking at how physiological anxiety relates to impairments in both working memory and reinforcement learning processes www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A paper in Communications Engineering presents a new method to optimally cook both the yolk and white of a boiled chicken egg. "Periodic cooking” yields an evenly-cooked egg with a higher nutritional content than shell-on eggs cooked by conventional methods. https://go.nature.com/4hJWNzU 🧪

🚨New postdoc job alert!🚨 www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/... ...we are looking for someone with an interest in computational psychiatry and/or naturalistic neuroimaging to work on a new ERC Advanced grant "The Neurocomputational Mechanisms of Anxiety Treatment Response (MECHANX)". (1/3)