Common neural choice signals reflect accumulated evidence, not confidence! Now out in @cerebralcortex.bsky.social w @helenevanmarcke.bsky.social @pierreledenmat.bsky.social @yfvisser.bsky.social @denizerdil.bsky.social a.o. Paper: desenderlab.com/wp-content/u... Thread ↓↓↓

🚨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! 🧵

📢 Preprint out! biorxiv.org/content/10.1... What gives rise to probability weighting, a cornerstone of Prospect Theory? We show it comes from the natural boundedness of probabilities + cognitive noise. Adding boundaries adds multiple distortions, across risky choice & perception.

Big congrats to Marishka on this. I know how much time and effort went into it. Really happy to see it out! For those interested, she replicated prior longitudinal results using an approach-avoidance conflict task and showed how model parameters afforded out-of-sample clinical prediction.

New paper in CPsy 📢 - from Mostafa Abdou, @raziasahi.bsky.social, Thomas Hull, @eriknook.bsky.social and @nathanieldaw.bsky.social - cpsyjournal.org/articles/10....

Thrilled that our new review "Motor Working Memory" is now in press at TiCS! @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social @cellpress.bsky.social By me + Hanna Hillman We argue that a dedicated research program on 'working memory for movements' is long overdue Link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lmMX4sIRv...

Now out in JEP: General, "How working memory and reinforcement learning interact when avoiding punishment and pursuing reward concurrently" psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... Preprint with final version: osf.io/preprints/ps... 1/n

I wanted to add some thoughts to this excellent blog post, not detailed, maybe wrong, maybe useful: 1. Unique variance is easy to interpret as a lower bound of what a variable explains (the upper bound being either what the variable explains alone or what the other variables cannot explain uniquely)

Spotlighting researchers sharing open-source paradigms in PsychoPy! ✨ This week: Individual differences in visual attention: A short, reliable, open-source, multilingual test of multiple object tracking in PsychoPy 🔗 link.springer.com/article/10.3... #OpenScience #PsychologyResearch #Research

ggplot2 4.0.0 is out and the new `paper`, `ink`, `accent` theme variables look super cool! Just pick 2-3 colors 🎨 to make your plots look great! I'm excited to hook this up to brand.yml 😉

Awesome new preprint from @jasonleng.bsky.social! Deadlines in decision making often truncate too-slow responses. Failing to account for these omissions can (severely) bias your DDM parameter estimates. They offer a great solution to correct for this issue. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

📢 New preprint! How do humans learn from arbitrary, abstract goals? We show that, when goal spaces can be compressed, costly working-memory processes give way to internalized reward functions, enabling efficient goal-dependent reinforcement learning. @annecollins.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2509.06810

Excited to share this update to our paper investigating the role of superior colliculus inputs to the ventral midbrain in learning and movement. Studies led by the amazing Dr. @carlipoisson.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New paper from my lab testing how the breadth of attentional focus influences visual distraction by salient stimuli. Across six experiments, we find no ERP or behavioral evidence in support of the attentional window account. Read about it on my blog: gaspelinblog.wordpress.com/2025/09/08/t...

Ever wondered why you keep going to that restaurant with stale fries? Is it because you went often in the past (perseveration) or because you remember past good experiences better (positivity bias)? Our study out in PNAS investigates the normative basis for these biases www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I want to do a session on principles of designing scientific figures with my lab. Any recommendation for good online material? #PsychSciSky #neuroskyence #Neuroimaging

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...

The two key studies of the International Brain Laboratory @intlbrainlab.bsky.social are out today! A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour www.nature.com/articles/s41... Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint! We are pleased to share our Hierarchical Bayesian framework for Interoceptive Psychophysics! Implemented in rstan, we provide a complete suite of tools spanning model comparison, parameter recovery, multifactor designs, power analysis, and more! 🎯 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Precise temporal localisation of M/EEG effects with Bayesian generalised additive multilevel models https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.29.672336v1

Tour de force review on “Economics of Attention” by Loewenstein just published in J Econ Lit @aeajournals.bsky.social #behavioraleconomics

Happy to see this out: our new preprint shows that laminar GE-BOLD fMRI decoding isn’t immune to vascular draining biases. Simulations reveal false positives due to multivariate signal spread across layers, but oversampling + deconvolution can (sometimes) improve specificity.

At long last, the pre-print to our MEG study + RIFT study and the final paper from my Ph.D with @olejensen.bsky.social We show that strong pre-search alpha oscillations are associated with faster responses in visual search www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... @thechbh.bsky.social #neuroskyence

New preprint...and this one is truly EPIC 🚨. Using a large group of patients with depression and healthy controls (N>800), we show differences in the functional segregation of insular subnetworks. And we can use it to classify! Led by @glassybrain.bsky.social #neuroskyence 🩺 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Our target discussion article out in Cognitive Neuroscience! It will be followed by peer commentary and our responses. If you would like to write a commentary, please reach out to the journal! 1/18 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... @cibaker.bsky.social @susanwardle.bsky.social

New paper out in Behavioral Research Methods! We introduce a simulation-based method using RNNs to infer trial-varying latent variables from computational cognitive models. Link: doi.org/10.3758/s134... #ComputationalCognitiveModeling #SBI

After 5 years, I finally carved out time to turn this blog post on FDR (markallenthornton.com/blog/fdr-pro...) into a manuscript. The preprint features a much broader range of simulations showing how FDR promotes confounds, and how this effect compounds with publication bias: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Excellent new review by @claireocallaghan.bsky.social on how noradrenaline drives learning across multiple scales of neurobiological organization - from cells to networks www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

🧠 Excited to share that our new preprint is out!🧠 In this work, we investigate the dynamic competition between bottom-up saliency and top-down goals in the early visual cortex using rapid invisible frequency tagging (RIFT). 📄 Check it out on bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

After scrolling Twitter, it will take you a while to get back into “work mode”. Why is this the case? Our new work (out now in Psych Review), led by Ivan Grahek and Xiamin Leng, explores the costs of adjusting cognitive control to meet different goals: psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... 🧵 A thread:

Are interoception and mental health linked? Many assume so, with interoception even described as a psychiatric “p-factor.” But in our latest preprint, we were surprised to find little evidence for such a connection. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 Thread with our reflections on the matter 👇

Interoceptive Ability is Unrelated to Mental Health Symptoms: Evidence From a Large Scale Multi-Domain Psychophysical Investigation https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.25.25334366v1

New paper using M/EEG to look at attractive and repulsive serial dependence in working memory, led by the excellent Jiangang Shan, with Jasper Hajonides.

do classic decoy effects take place in real-world shopping decisions? wine purchase records in a massive grocery dataset says: yes new work with (former) student Sean Devine, @anyaskatova.bsky.social , James Goulding, and John Harvey www.nature.com/articles/s41... (sorry for the titular pun)

🚨 New preprint: Invisible neural frequency tagging (RIFT) for the underfunded researcher: 👉 www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/... RIFT uses high-frequency flicker to probe attention in M/EEG with minimal stimulus visibility and little distraction. Until now, it required a costly high-speed projector.

#EEGManyLabs website is now live: eegmanylabs.org A home for our global effort to test the replicability of influential EEG findings, share resources, improve methods in cognitive neuroscience, and grow an open, connected community.

Very happy that our paper on intertemporal Pavlovian biases and mental health is out now in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience! https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13415-025-01326-9. (1/6)

🧵 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...

Now on CRAN, ggdiagram is a #ggplot2 extension that draws diagrams programmatically in #Rstats. Allows for precise control in how objects, labels, and equations are placed in relation to each other. wjschne.github.io/ggdiagram/ar...

Low-intensity focused ultrasound to human amygdala reveals a causal role in ambiguous emotion processing and alters local and network-level activity https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.14.670358v1

Very happy to share my first preprint from @oxexppsy.bsky.social @oxneuro.bsky.social ! We (me + co-first authors @lilweb.bsky.social @mirunarascu.bsky.social + PI @mkflugge.bsky.social + many others) used transcranial focused ultrasound stimulation (TUS/tFUS/LIFU) of the human amygdala ... (1/15)

On the left is a rabbit. On the right is an elephant. But guess what: They’re the *same image*, rotated 90°! In @currentbiology.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show how these images—known as “visual anagrams”—can help solve a longstanding problem in cognitive science. bit.ly/45BVnCZ

{truffle} is an R package for teaching users to process data. Semi-realistic psychological datasets with predetermined effects (via `truffles_` functions) are then hidden in common data processing headaches (via `dirt_` functions) for students to clean and analyze. mmmdata.io/posts/2025/0...

Excited to share my first fMRI paper in @pnas.org We found that suppressing the encoding of one event can strengthen the neural representation of the next in CA1, and bias retrieval-related neural restatement away from suppressed information. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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 .

I gave a talk in 2009 about feature-based attention and a famous vision scientist asked how top down signals from PFC could possibly target the right sensory neurons. The best I could do was "uh, dunno". sunyoungp.bsky.social has a much more thoughtful answer journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Excited to share our new paper on theta-phase locking of single neurons during human spatial memory: www.nature.com/articles/s41... With @lukaskunz.bsky.social, Joshua Jacobs, and our colleagues from the University of Freiburg

You’re now breathing manually 🌬️ What underlies this ability to be consciously aware of own breathing? In our new Journal of Neuroscience paper, we report the largest study to date linking brain microstructure to respiratory interoception. www.jneurosci.org/content/earl... 🧵 👇

🚨 New paper out in Mind & Society! Human reinforcement learning processes and biases: computational characterization and possible applications to behavioral public policy 🔗 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Machine learning / AI approaches can work well for model comparison and fitting, but how do they stack up against likelihood-based methods like hierarchical Bayes / MCMC? link.springer.com/article/10.3... (Generally the same for fitting, but neural networks were better for model comparison!)