Do people judge what is going to happen in unknown situations differently depending on their socioeconomic position? Yes, if you experience lower socioeconomic position, you think the big rewards are even more unlikely to come your way: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Preprint updated --> Key new results: we found a brain-behavior correlation between performance on an RL task (under short feedback delays) and short-delay RPE signals in the 'cognitive' cerebellum! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Very happy to share our paper on the "summer slide" in kid's cognitive test scores is out now in @pnas.org! We find a replicable dip in performance across multiple domains of cognition in >23,000 kids across 4 datasets! Check out the 🧵 from @ariellekeller.bsky.social below! 👇

Our paper on the ☀️ "summer slide" 🛝 is out now @pnas.org! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Summer slide is a replicable phenomenon across diverse datasets that's more than "forgetting" school material in vacation months, but effects of socioeconomic inequality are ➡️ 7x bigger! ⬅️ #PsychSciSky #DevPsy 🧵👇

This is an important study but psilocybin potentially promoting brain tumor growth is consistent with human studies suggesting SSRIs may worsen survival outcomes in glioma

One citizen said that federal agents in Idaho pointed guns at her children, ages 6 and 8, and dragged her 14-year-old daughter out of a truck and zip-tied her. The mother told investigators that an agent threatened to “fucking blow your head off.” By @nicolefoy.bsky.social

ICE sprayed a one-year-old in the face with pepper spray. The child and parents are US citizens, but that doesn't even matter. These monsters pepper-sprayed a baby. We cannot allow ICE to continue this behavior, and they aren't going to reform themselves. www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...

Patterns of brain-wide associations reflect socioeconomics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.10.693206v1

Call for papers: Emotion special issue on Affect Dynamics Across Multiple Timescales (moments→days→years) and links to mental and physical health. Letters of intent due Jan 15, 2026. Details/submission: www.apa.org/pubs/journal... Please share with colleagues/trainees. @affectscience.bsky.social

“Gift brains turn on” is a clever example of Pavlovian-instrumental transfer (PIT): Snow and holiday gifts is a Pavlovian mental association (Stimulus-Outcome) ”Transfer” is a triggering of an “instrumental” response, to generate the Response that yields the outcome (R-O) by buying gifts.

How Effortful Is Boredom? Studying Self-Control Demands Through Pupillometry, from Vanessa Radtke, @wanjawolff.bsky.social, and @corimartarelli.bsky.social #RegisteredReport doi.org/10.1525/coll...

ICYMI — “I identified myself as a U.S. citizen and a veteran, but that didn't matter. ICE Agents smashed my window, sprayed tear gas and pepper spray into my car, dragged me out… this experience violated the very principles I fought to defend.”

#RewardSignals #neuroskyence

NMDA receptor ablation in medial prefrontal cortex disrupts value updating and reward history integration https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.06.692679v1

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1... - An Integrated Immuno-Reward Model of Adolescent Depression: Theory, Evidence, and Implications Lauren B. Alloy orcid.org/0000-0002-51... [email protected] and Robin Nusslock

Excited to share our new GLP-1 receptor agonist study! Chronic semaglutide potentiates motivation for small food rewards and associated cues, but reduces intake when food is freely available—surprising twist! #GLP-1, #behavior #neuroscience #pharmacology 1/ 🔗 www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Chronic semaglutide treatment shows differential effects on incentive motivation and consummatory responses to food #RewardSignals #neuroskyence

“She has marks on her neck and wrist from where agents restrained her. Agents cut off her wedding ring and held her in leg shackles at Whipple Federal Building for about five hours.” Her crime: witnessing ICE, from a distance.

This is really cool!! In this paper www.nature.com/articles/s41..., we found anhedonia measures were assoc with an in-lab, induced "sunburn", even when controlling for 'skin type spectrum score', sex, age, & minority status. Cutaneous erythema (like sunburn) is also linked to NLRP3 inflammasome!

anyone got any advice on the following situation? I wrote and did a big chunk of the admin for a large MRC grant which also also awarded. I am named in the Staff breakdown on the grant as "researcher co-lead" with 100%FTE, and I am mentioned by name as "postdoctoral researcher Maria Niedernhuber"

Final #neuroskyence preprint of the year! We updated our big neuroinflammation project, studying psoriasis-like inflammation in both humans and mice. Main take-home: we see impaired thalamostriatal signalling in humans and mice alongside depression / anhedonia. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

“.. Last year, the percentage of H-1B-sponsored doctors in rural counties was nearly twice the share in urban ones ..” @washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

Excited to use my first post to share our new paper and my first first-authorship! "Linking reinforcement learning, working memory, and choice dynamics to age and symptoms of anxiety and depression in adolescence" in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 🎉https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2025.101626

Under Trump, the NIH is giving fewer grants to fewer scientists. The grants awarded are smaller and scientists have less time to spend them. Projects in cancer, diabetes, aging, neurological disorder, and more are going unfunded. “Make America Healthy Again.”

Southern Sunday dinner!! Chicken and cornbread waffles, collard/mustard greens, carrots, parsnips and leeks, and black eyed peas (hiding at the bottom of the bowl)

Keep this story in the news. "Man Detained by ICE Found Dead, Hanging With Hands and Feet Tied—Attorney" www.newsweek.com/ice-detainee...

🧠💸 Launching the RewardSignals feed RewardSignals is a custom feed collecting posts about reward processing and decision making. To appear in the feed, tag your post with #RewardSignals. You can find and pin the feed from the Feeds tab as “RewardSignals”. #RewardSignals

Things that will get you kicked out of academia forever: - taking maternity leave at the wrong time - spending too much time with your kids - reporting harassment - not moving every 2-3 years - taking a partner's job/preferences into account - mouthing off before tenure

Childhood adversity, low positive affect and psychopathology: a meta-analytic structural equation modeling study www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Check out this cool new experimental study by Jonas Dora, et al on the effects of negative mood ☹️ and alcohol intoxication 🍺🍸on reinforcement learning!!

Any computational RL people have thoughts (or even better a link to a paper) about effect sizes in the context of RL parameters like learning rate? I vaguely remember talking to someone about effect sizes possibly not being very meaningful…but a paper on the topic would be awesome!!

NEW: Epstein survivors release the most powerful PSA I have ever seen. Make this go viral so every member of the House of Representatives sees it.

Any computational RL people have thoughts (or even better a link to a paper) about effect sizes in the context of RL parameters like learning rate? I vaguely remember talking to someone about effect sizes possibly not being very meaningful…but a paper on the topic would be awesome!!

Michigan helped reignite the career of cancer survivor Suzanne Perkins @20thofmay.bsky.social, whose research stems from the insight that education plays a key role in recovery for children at risk. Now she's crafting the future of learning: myumi.ch/9pWk3 #LifeChangingEducation #LookToMichigan

In the olden dayes we would know by now the relative force impact of a fully laden subway sandwich fired at point blank range by an inebriated individual who hasn’t thrown anything in 15 years. Academic tweetersky is a pale shadow. 🙁

Thank you so much to all of my co-authors on this paper; I certainly would not have received this award without all of the brilliant support I have gotten!

Awesome work on dense sampling of reward response from @mattmattoni.bsky.social!!! with a great thread detailing findings!!

In which a top US Border Patrol official, incredibly, tells my tall and Anglo colleague @chipmitchell1.bsky.social that he's not the type they're looking for as they go about downtown Chicago arresting people based on "how they look" chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/...

somehow I missed this! Dopamine represents a domain-general teaching signal: www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Corn bread in a waffle iron is next level!!!

This is a real photograph of Washington, DC this week, where the United States president has ordered military occupation in peacetime, and ordered the display of colossal portraits of himself. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Do late adolescents and emerging adults who live in a communities with higher violent crime rates exhibit altered reward-related neural activation? This question was recently investigated in a sample of 101 adolescents. Read more in BSAM, free for the week! #healthpsych #psychscicky

✨ New paper ✨ in JAMA Pediatrics! We discuss how understanding the timing ⏰ of stressful events relative to neurodevelopment can help us better identify risk factors (looking backward) and predict future psychopathology (looking forward) at the individual level #neuroskyence #devpsych #PsychSciSky

Underrepresented minority faculty in the USA face a double standard in promotion and tenure decisions

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 .