Our brains don’t think in a steady stream. They rhythmically “scan” different alternatives, using attention cycles to sample and compare choices. Rhythmic sampling of multiple decision alternatives in the human brain www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

🎉New positions!🎉 Postdoc and Research technician openings in our lab @yale for computational psychiatry research. Technician position a great stepping stone to grad school. More info: rutledgelab.org/positions Work w/big data from our smartphone apps and large clinical samples happinessquest.app

Coordinated human prefrontal dynamics sustain task-state representations during learning www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Delighted to share our new publication in @apertureohbm.bsky.social - the "Human Single-Neuron Pipeline" for managing human single-neuron research projects! It's an open-source resource of new & existing tools & resources curated for HSN projects: hsnpipeline.github.io

👋 Happy to see this paper published in PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2529176123 Asking: is curiosity a homeostatic drive, or a policy learned through reinforcement? How can we tell, and why does it matter? 🧵👇 With Jane Mok, @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social, Caroline Marvin, and Daphna Shohamy 🙏

Excited to share our new Nature Methods paper on DeepCor, a contrastive autoencoder for denoising fMRI. DeepCor separates neural signal from noise at the voxel level, works for single participants, and outperforms CompCor by up to 215% on real data. 1/7 doi.org/10.1038/s415...

📢 New preprint out now! In three samples (N=594), including a U.S.-representative cohort and a test-retest cohort, we formalize social motivation, learning, and homeostatic control within a single computational framework and identify a phenotype linked to chronic loneliness doi.org/10.31234/osf...

New Annual Review with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social: “Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is.” We argue that the brain's 'planning' machinery is mostly used for learning from simulated experience, and that thinking prospectively at decision time is just one special case of this process.

What makes adaptive decision-making possible? New preprint connecting cognitive, social, biological, and computational views! w/ Dorst, FeldmanHall, @smfleming.bsky.social, @catehartley.bsky.social, Gottlieb, Lejarraga, Müller-Trede, @angelaradulescu.bsky.social, and Rosati osf.io/preprints/ps...

Posting on behalf of Brendan: Common feature selection practices may capture only the “tip of the iceberg” of distributed brain–behavior relationships Specifically, typically discarded features can predict behavior just as well as top-ranked ones, yet produce diverging interpretations

New preprint from my lab! We study how reinforcement learning & selective attention interact. To do so, we built a set of models describing different ways that value & reward prediction error can modulate top-down attention. We compare model outcomes to monkey data from a color value learning task

📣🔥 Early bird registration now open for 2026 Computational Psychiatry Conference cpconf.org at Yale July 14-16. Late-breaking abstracts now open (deadline: May 8) Trainee pre-conference (July 13) registration open (free!) See you in New Haven! #CPConf2026

New this year: free trainee pre-conference on July 13 organized by @cehaeffner.bsky.social @adanyajohnson.bsky.social Pre-conference tickets are free for main conference attendees but space is limited to 75 people so register early! www.cpconf.org/faq-cpconf20...

🧵 I gave Claude two things: a short paper (doi.org/10.1073/pnas...) and a raw behavioural dataset with 3 lines of variable descriptions. Then I asked it to fit three computational RL models described only by equations in the manuscript. No code, no toolbox, no guidance on the fitting procedure. 1/3

Excited to share our new paper proposing a new computational model accounting for the dynamic interaction btw drug #craving and #decision-making, led by Kaustubh Kulkarni, MD/PhD rdcu.be/fab6B #AddictionScience #Neuroscience #ComputationalPsychiatry #BehavioralScience

Hey friends, my new paper was just published in JAMA Psychiatry. I draw on biological species classification to sketch a new framework for psychiatric nosology. Brief summary follows below. Full text link: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... 🧪 #PsychSciSky #MentalHealth

🧠 Resting-state fMRI is often treated as the gold standard for studying the brain’s intrinsic organization. But is it actually the best way to estimate functional architecture? We tested this directly. 🧵1/8

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗳𝗼𝗹𝗱𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻? This looks like a must read (suppl material bursting with goodies). #neuroskeyence doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

Excited to share our latest paper in which we discuss merging theory-and data- driven computational psychiatry in a large transdiagnostic cohort study (N=2400) www.biologicalpsychiatrycnni.org/article/S245... Christopher Pittenger, Godfrey Pearlson @annierhcheng.bsky.social @sobp-org.bsky.social

I am totally pumped about this new work . "Task-trained RNNs" are a powerful and influential framework in neuroscience, but have lacked a firm theoretical footing. This work provides one, and makes direct contact with the classical theory of random RNNs: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🚨📃New Wassum Lab Paper 📃🚨 Out today, Melissa Malvaez, Nick Griffin, Andrea Suarez & team discovered that dopamine can enable reward predictions to shape how we pursue reward. Surprisingly, we find that dopamine can constrain instrumental reward seeking. www.jneurosci.org/content/46/8... 🧵👇🏻

Very excited to post our paper led by @daburke.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... where we uncover a simple mathematical rule underlying how brains learn that a cue predicts a reward. 1/26

Thrilled to share that our work on neural circuits and economic decision-making is now published in @cp-neuron.bsky.social . Huge thanks to @camillopadoasch.bsky.social and @xjwanglab for this journey. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Thrilled that my paper is out in the @nature.com. We explored how the brain builds complex tasks by compositionally combining simpler sub-task representations. The brain flexibly performs multiple tasks by dynamically reusing neural subspaces for sensory inputs and motor actions rdcu.be/eRVUk

Check out @orielf.bsky.social & I's chapter "Emotion and Choice: The Integral Role of Emotion in Constructing Value" in the new volume, Neuroeconomics: Core Topics and Current Directions, edited by @dvsmith.bsky.social @thepsychologist.bsky.social & @dfareri.bsky.social doi.org/10.1007/978-...

The hippocampal map has its own attentional control signal! Our new study reveals that theta #sweeps can be instantly biased towards behaviourally relevant locations. See 📹 in post 4/6 and preprint here 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵(1/6)

From @patrickmineault.bsky.social, on how scientists can use Claude Code to help with all the heavy data analysis coding that is a big part of our lives. use a make system, set up folder structures, write tests, use git, use package managers. Notes on notebooks and visualizations too. 🧪

🌟 Job alert! We are looking for a postdoc to join a multidisciplinary research team working on the Individually Measured Phenotypes to Advance Computational Translation at Yale (IMPACT-Y) study. postdocs.yale.edu/posts/2026-0...

Preprint alert!!! We recorded directly from the human ventral tegmental area (VTA), the principal source of cortical dopaminergic innervation, while patients performed an instrumental learning task. 🧵👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Reward as drive reduction, the return! This opinion piece on the explanatory and unifying power of the homeostatic reinforcement learning framework is amazingly accessible, despite its technical nature, and extremely insightful 👏 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 1/2

Looking for a postdoc in #computationalpsychiatry? Apply here to join an interdisciplinary team and work with a large longitudinal transdiagnostic dataset postdocs.yale.edu/posts/2026-0... @RobbRutledge @xiaosigu @DrChrisPitt @PearlsonGodfrey @ACNPorg @YaleMed

‪Voxelwise Encoding Models (VEMs) are a great framework for modeling fMRI data, but it can be difficult to implement. We've made VEM accessible by providing software, tutorials and reviews that guide its use an implementation. Get it here: gallantlab.org/blog/2025-12... #neuroscience, #neuroimaging

I'm looking to hire a postgraduate research associate in Computational Psychiatry for my new lab at Yale. Please see link below for details & help RT 🙏 postdocs.yale.edu/posts/2026-0...

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵 rdcu.be/eVZ1A

This is your brain on Ritalin. Got your attention? Stimulant medications like Ritalin (methylphenidate) do, but not in the way you might think. They don't act directly on the brain’s attention systems! Find out what's really happening in @cellpress.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...

Thoughtful review with some good recent historical perspective on the ongoing paradigm shift that is radically changing the way we think about what brain areas do. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Exciting new work from @lindenmp.bsky.social and friends! Inferring intrinsic neural timescales using optimal control theory www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New study out today in Nature Comms: www.nature.com/articles/s41..., in which we set out to test whether ultrasound could influence the reward-related learning computations of the nucleus accumbens, building on decades of work on dopaminergic prediction error and reinforcement learning. And it did.

Another nail in the coffin for PCA? - doesn’t linearize, distorting similarity metrics - is biased by temporal jitter across epochs - may miss important dimensions for transient amplification If you think there is a state space, use a state space model!

📣🔥Thrilled to announce that 2026 Computational Psychiatry Conference will take place in New Haven, CT, btw July 14-16 - www.cpconf.org @robbrutledge.bsky.social @drrickadams.bsky.social @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social @docqhuys.bsky.social @clairegillan.bsky.social Sonia Bishop More info to come soon!

Excited to share this review in @biologicalpsych.bsky.social on using transfer learning to leverage large MRI datasets & enhance precision psychiatry!! www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S000... Fun collab with rockstars @diawang.bsky.social @bttyeo.bsky.social @avramholmes.bsky.social

🚨Our preprint is online!🚨 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning? Read on to find out more! 🧵

The TiCS issue featuring our paper on "A timeline of cognitive costs in decision-making" is now available online 😄 Honored to have been a part of this awesome interdisciplinary mega-collab led by Christin Schulze (UNSW Sydney) www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Better Code, Better Science - Introducing a new open-source book project on scientific coding using AI tools russpoldrack.substack.com/p/better-cod...

Just Now: a federal judge ruled that our case (AAUP v. Rubio) seeking to block the Trump admin from carrying out large-scale arrests, detentions, & deportations of noncitizen students & faculty members who participate in pro-Palestinian protests can go forward. @knightcolumbia.org

𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝘄𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗱𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗮 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗿𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗼𝗻'𝘀 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲? We introduce the idea of "importance" in terms of the extent to which a region's signals steer/contribute to brain dynamics as a function of brain state. Work by @codejoydo.bsky.social elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...