Very happy to share this new paper, published in @elife.bsky.social, the last one stemming from a PhD chapter 🥲. In it, @spk3lly.bsky.social and I show that an early V1 signal (the C1) can have direct influence on a perceptual decision. Here's the link: doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

🚨📃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... 🧵👇🏻

Maybe of interest: The submission guidelines of Psychological Science now demand an explicit statement on measures taken to reduce the risk of AI-generated responses for all online studies! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus). Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Happy to share my first first-author paper, new in Science Advances: Deciding for others alters metacognition leading to responsibility aversion www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #ScienceAdvancesResearch @zne-uzh.bsky.social @econ.uzh.ch

Our reply to 11 commentaries on our article ("Rethinking category-selectivity in human visual cortex") is out in Cognitive Neuroscience! Thanks to @susanwardle.bsky.social @maryamvaziri.bsky.social Dwight Kravitz @cibaker.bsky.social and all who contributed! 1/x www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Ultrasound gives our brain a nudge in the right direction 🧠 👀 Look to your left, look to your right! We used #ultrasound to stimulate the brain and it changed human choice behavior within a fraction of a second. No surgery, no implants. Link to paper ⬇️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper from the lab now out online! @changrun-huang.bsky.social asked whether people use informative pre-cues to up-regulate cognitive control in the spatial Stroop task. Surprisingly, they do not, and we rule out some possible reasons why. Enjoy!

I reviewed 5+ fMRI papers on response inhibition within roughly the last year, and the same points come up over and over again. So I wrote a short note last week entitled "The unique limitations of BOLD-fMRI in the study of response inhibition". You can read it here. osf.io/preprints/ps...

“Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords kiki & bouba with spiky & round shapes, respectively...We tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby chickens. Similar to humans, they spontaneously chose a spiky shape when hearing a kiki sound & a round shape when hearing a bouba.”😲🧪

Recent work has shown how vulnerable online survey research is to LLMs. Motivated by this, we examined our online Posner cueing data from Prolific. It's concerning. We now must carefully consider when (or whether?) online behavioral data can be trusted. see our comment: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🚨 New preprint: Objective Quality Assessment for Precision fMRI Precision functional mapping (PFM) enables individual-level brain network studies — but demands more, and better, data. We introduce an objective framework to determine when a dataset truly supports interpretable, replicable PFM.

Excited to share my first PhD paper with @ashenhav.bsky.social @shenhavlab.bsky.social “Rejection-based choices discourage people from opting out of voting.” www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I propose to make universal the old policy of the Blackfriars conference at the American Shakespeare Center: If you do not end your paper on time, you will be forced to exit, pursued by a bear. Literally, a bear will come take your paper from you.

Our paper is now out at JNeuro! www.jneurosci.org/content/earl... How do we avoid attentional capture by salient stimuli? We found that inversions of singleton distractor representations support attentional suppression of salient items.

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

New paper alert 📣 #Neuroskyence "Rhythmic sampling of multiple decision alternatives in the human brain" @natcomms.nature.com together with @ycaoneuro.bsky.social @maryamtohidi.bsky.social @donnerlab.bsky.social @ktsetsos.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵1/

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

Very happy to see "Pretending not to know reveals a capacity for model-based self-simulation", a collaboration with @chazfirestone.bsky.social and @ianbphillips.bsky.social, out in Psych. Science! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177... 🧵

Everything I ever needed to know in life I learned from the men in the Epstein files statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/02/08/e...

I see your point in that *most* predictive processing approaches are representational, but this is not necessary. I wrote about this here: direct.mit.edu/jocn/article... Key quote from the abstract: "...without recourse to hidden states".

Imagination in bonobos! I am thrilled to share a new paper w/ Amalia Bastos, out now in @science.org We provide the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman animal can follow along a pretend scenario & track imaginary objects. Work w/ Kanzi, the bonobo, at Ape Initiative youtu.be/NUSHcQQz2Ko

Very happy that @PNASNews agreed to publish our (w/ @romanececchi.bsky.social) response to Prakhar's thought-provoking study! You can find the final version at the link below. See the following tweet for Prakhar's response to our response. Happy to hear your thoughts! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Working with rats, & not happy w MRI based brain atlases from adult males? We've got you! High resolution (2photon), 3D atlases (female rats) are now available in @brainglobe.info. Plz start using these atlases & let us know your feedback for the official release! brainglobe.info/blog/swc-fem... 🐭🧠

A grad student I know recently had his work covered in a high profile outlet...but his name wasn't mentioned at all despite his advisor explicitly saying he did all of the work. Since I've straddled the line between academic and journalist, I see both sides. Here are a couple ways to avoid this:

New meta finds no correlation between testosterone and risk preference, buuuuut testosterone was mainly measured using 2D:4D (nonsense) or saliva (still bad) and we know from Frey et al. 2017 that the risk measures don't tap into a coherent preference. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A lovely read about researchers who make animals happy for a living 😊 A day spent playing the sounds of baby bonobo laughter is surely a day well spent www.sciencenews.org/article/scie...

What does the path from basic psychological science to clinical treatment actually look like? We mapped 50 years of research in our new paper in Clinical Psychology Review with @abitter.bsky.social , Viktoria Ritter, @rief01.bsky.social , & Anke Haberkamp. 📖 authors.elsevier.com/a/1mXJm%7E0r... 📖

Zotero 8 is out (www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-8/). If you're not already using, highly recommended!

𝗦𝗽𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗲𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗼𝗿 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝘀𝘂𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳-𝗱𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗮𝘀𝗸𝘀 More hidden markov models for cool behaviors and brain data #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

🚨Special issue in Schizophrenia Bulletin on Computational markers of psychosis - From latent states to neurobiological mechanisms! Led by @cognemo.bsky.social and me!! We are still accepting submissions until April 30 (despite the date in the website 😅) academic.oup.com/schizophreni...

Love this. “Spontaneous” has always really meant “we don’t know why X is happening”, a perspective tied to the dominance of structured task paradigms for studying cognition, behavior, and brain activity.

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...

New preprint by @semihaktepe.bsky.social 🎉 We compare ANOVA/SDT/GLMM for binary judgments in 20 datasets of the truth effect. #lme4 Main conclusion: "GLMMs are a theoretically sound and practically robust method and thus superior for analyzing binary judgments in social and cognitive psychology.”

Do goal-directed actions minimize prediction error? Together with @haslagter.bsky.social and @fahrenfort.bsky.social I identified falsifiable predictions of active inference and reviewed the extent to which they are supported by empirical results. Read the preprint here: tinyurl.com/2by8k3h6

"Social media is like a Skinner box" is a phrase I've heard repeated a lot, but never meaningfully engaged with. We try and do so in this preprint. Behaviorist principles are very useful to understanding digital behavior, but work in this area tends not to be aware of them. So, we provide a primer.

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

How do people compute a sense of confidence? This question is usually addressed using very simple images because we don't know how complex stimuli are represented internally. In a new paper, we addressed this question using artificial neural networks (ANNs). journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

The Iowa Gambling Task is an extreme example of Jingle Fallacy and schmeasurement. In 100 articles we found 244 different ways of scoring it, 177 were never reused. Correlations between them range -.99 to .99. At the same time, we show meta-analyses combine these results as if they’re equivalent.

𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗼 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝘂𝗻𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻? "High-resolution activity maps of PFC did NOT align with cytoarchitecturally defined subregions." Key tenet in neuroscience is that cytoarchitectonic boundaries correspond to functional ones. NB: study in the mouse #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1038/s415...

🚨 New paper out in Science Advances 🚨 With @suryagayet.bsky.social and @peelen.bsky.social, in two fMRI studies we investigate mental object rotations that are driven by the scene context, rather than purely by cognitive operations. 🧵 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Main postdoc study out! We can redefine prefrontal cortex regions with single-unit activity! Grateful to @carlenlab.bsky.social and @weltgeischt.bsky.social who made this crazy project real. Thanks to all co-authors, collaborators, and reviewers. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Very happy to see this out now in @nathumbehav.nature.com - kudos to @magdadelrio.bsky.social who has led this work and nicely brought together data from two very different studies! article is here: doi.org/10.1038/s415... and PDF is here: rdcu.be/eZ27x

Interpreting EEG requires understanding how the skull smears electrical fields as they propagate from the cortex. I made a browser-based simulator for my EEG class to visualize how dipole depth/orientation change the topomap. dbrang.github.io/EEG-Dipole-D... Github page: github.com/dbrang/EEG-D...

Same sound, different perception: Do expectations change what you hear?👂🧠 We paired faces w topics and played the same ambiguous speech w different faces. The brain sharpened sensory signals toward predictions and showed gated prediction errors at higher levels. Read @plosbiology.org. Blueprint👇

For 15(!) years I’ve been teaching introductory #MRI to grad students, and struggled to find a textbook for a wide variety of backgrounds. I'm happy to share an online textbook I created, fully open source (including code for generating figures and plots shown): larsonlab.github.io/MRI-educatio...

NEW: We show and replicate socioeconomic gradients in heuristics for decision-making under uncertainty, possibly reflecting adaptations varying levels of scarcity and competition for resources 🫰 Shoutout and thanks to @danielnettle.bsky.social & @coraliechevallier.bsky.social ❤️‍🔥 tinyurl.com/mu7rzz6k

Eine gesamte @laborjournal.bsky.social Ausgabe zum Thema „Fördermittelvergabe“ mit Erfahrungsberichten der Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre, der @volkswagenstiftung.de und weiteren Forschungsgruppen. 👇🏼 www.laborjournal.de/editorials/m...

New paper out! In this work, published in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, we investigated the role of impatient intertemporal choice across mental health in a community sample (N = 899) using a novel transdiagnostic research approach. doi.org/10.1002/bdm.... (1/6)

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.