📢 Out now in PLOS Comp Biol: **cpm** — a Python library for theory-driven modelling in computational psychiatry. No scikit-learn for mechanistic cognitive models — so we built one: RL, prospect-theory & metacognition, hierarchical Bayes, and as many more as you can code 🔗 doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Hippocampal engrams configure prefrontal context representations to guide flexible decisions Impressive combo of methods to manipulate and record this process: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

you may be afraid to set priors, but Claude sure as heck aint. 😅

waiting for NUTS to finish sampling be like

🧠 What if #LongCovid is, in part, a disorder of dopamine? Our new commentary explores how disrupted dopamine signaling may help explain fatigue, brain fog, and autonomic dysfunction, and what this could mean for future therapies. Open access link: shorturl.at/vLAfU

Remarkable how far being nice to people can take you in life.

New lab preprint! Computational psychiatry assumes anxiety arises from domain-general biases in learning and planning. We argue this is mistargeted: trait anxiety is generated by person-specific world models, which requires a fundamentally different approach to task design. 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...

New unit paper on "The hippocampus as a generative model", published in Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. www.bndu.ox.ac.uk/papers/hippo... @ndcnoxford.bsky.social @ox.ac.uk

New preprint led by @christineliu.art! How do psychedelics improve cognitive flexibility? Psilocybin prevents inflexibility caused by aberrant mesocortical error signaling (but not inflexibility due to other mechanisms); this is tied to plasticity of PFC-MD neurons: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

San Francesco Hospital, 20 participants. Researchers found the first in vivo evidence that Long COVID is linked to loss of cholinergic nerve fibers in the stomach lining. This structural vagus nerve damage may help explain lasting dysautonomia. www.ijidonline.com/article/S120...

New review from our group out in Nature Reviews Psychology: Determinants of individual navigation ability with my excellent co-author: @emre-yavuz-21.bsky.social

New paper alert from our lab! nature.com/articles/s41... We used stimuli sequences following 1/f statistical patterns—an ubiquitous statistical structure in natural stimuli—to probe predictive processing in the human brain. How does the brain predict upcoming sensory inputs based on past inputs?

And for our own contribution to the theme issue: Oliver Warrington and I show that the dentate gyrus encodes prediction errors during learning of perceptual predictions. This finding complements our previous work showing a transition from errors to predictions during learning (Aitken & Kok 2022). 🧠🟦

I am looking for a theory/computational POSTDOC position in EU or east coast US. I am interested in how learning and plasticity shape population dynamics & representational geometries & how these changes are reflected in behavior. If you are at #COSYNE2026 & interested, hit me up in Whova, not here

New paper out! We used MEG to catch the brain learning hidden patterns buried in noise and found two separate mechanisms at play: fast predictive activity (up to 500ms before a stimulus!) followed by slower representational change that tracks actual learning. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A new study in Nature demonstrates that diet-induced modulation of the gut microbiota can serve as a strategy to improve immunotherapy outcomes 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to share a paper recently accepted at Nature Mental Health! 😄 For decades, we've assumed that covariance among psychopathology informs comorbidity. What if we’ve been wrong?

New preprint out now. 🎭 What makes an acted emotion feel believable? We tested whether believability depends on what observers see from the outside, facial movement, and what happens inside the actor’s body, cardiac dynamics during performance. doi.org/10.64898/202...

This is one of my favourite things. Direct replication of MEG and fMRI findings in intracranial recordings and a demonstration that cortical representations update in the right direction around hippocampal ripples.

Very happy to be returning to UCL tomorrow, my old postdoc stomping grounds, to speak at the 2026 Summer School on Consciousness and Metacognition. I’ll present our work on interoception, arousal, and metacognition. London + metacognition science + a few sunny pints: hard to beat!

(1/6) My first first-author paper is now out in @nconsc.bsky.social! Part of my PhD work with @mamassian.bsky.social at @lsp-ens.bsky.social. We looked at how confidence behaves during a perceptual learning task with no feedback. academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...

The global neuronal workspace (GNW) is currently the best documented neuroscience mechanism by which conscious processing arises in the human brain — and now Anthropic researchers have discovered a similar workspace inside their large language model ! www.anthropic.com/research/glo...

“move from preprint to peer-reviewed publication leaves the central claims of most abstracts intact, indicating preprints are a reliable source…papers that were never posted as preprints were retracted at roughly twice the rate of those that were…” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Internal state dynamically gates task-specific attractor dynamics in prefrontal cortex www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #neuroscience

Why do animals age in such similar ways, yet live for wildly different spans - from days to a century? Our new paper in @NatureAging fits a damage accumulation model across 9 species and finds the knob that best predicts lifespan doi.org/10.1038/s435...

Beyond the paper itself, you can check out our project page here, which includes demos of each of our experiments as well as other data and materials. perceptionresearch.org/responsedura...

You press ‘send’ on a high-stakes email but hesitate when lifting your finger. You make a chess move but linger on the piece before letting go. Familiar? In @pnas.org, Hanbei Zhou @ruizhegoh.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social & I show that response *duration* tracks confidence! shorturl.at/A9NVe

New in PLOS Comp Bio, cool work from @timothyoleary.bsky.social showing that representational "drift" (lol, sorry for the scare quotes, Tim!), follows non-Gaussian statistics that can be beneficial for adaptive decoding: journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol... #neuroscience 🧪

"By measuring localized brain blood flow via functional MRI (fMRI) scanners, investigators demonstrated that paper reading provides stable spatial and tactile cues that allow the brain to organize and retrieve complex story information with significantly less cognitive effort."

Ever wondered how the hippocampal cognitive map is read-out? @changmin-yu.bsky.social @zilong-ji.bsky.social with Jake & John, show that, during navigation, theta sweeps indicate remembered goal-directions (cf. current/next movements or perceptual targets) 1/2 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

5/n We tested 46 tasks across four domains, grounded in brain networks studied in humans: language (supported by the language network), formal reasoning (Multiple-Demand network), physical reasoning (Intuitive Physics network), and social reasoning (Theory of Mind network).

Both brains and RNNs can re-use components of computation across similar tasks or contexts. But what exactly are those “shared components”? How can they be used to solve several tasks? We address these questions in a new preprint with @avm.bsky.social! Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

insula and cingulate once again at the top of the list for a brain marker of depression

Apologies, my algorithmic feed Neurobrain top was down for a few days due to server maintenance. It is back now! bsky.app/profile/mica...

Researchers used scans from more than 5,000 individuals to map how brain structure varies across many different cases of depression. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Human neuronal firing varies with the frequency of local field potential oscillations doi.org/10.1371/jour... #neuroscience

How does the human brain extract abstract structure from experience? We show that sensory-independent relational representations emerge in mPFC over several days. Work with @mgarvert.bsky.social and @behrenstimb.bsky.social now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social: www.cell.com/current-biol...

The 2nd seminar of the Interoception Circle is next Wed. 12-13:00 (CET) "Interoceptive plasticity: Alterations to breath-hold sensations and affective afforndaces in freediving" Link and abstract here: ace2lab.com/2581-2/

Learning shapes neural geometry in the primate prefrontal cortex www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Lovely to see the full range of excellent commentaries on our BBS article with @matthiasmichel.bsky.social, together with our response, now out: Target article: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... Commentaries: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... Our response: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

New work on the effects of psychedelics on hierarchical cortical propagations out in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Counter to our expectations, psychedelics attenuated bottom-up propagations into the Default Mode Network across substances and species. Thread below:

Interested in how dysregulation of locus coeruleus-norepinephrine circuits contribute to neuropsychiatric symptoms in early Alzheimer's disease? Check out our new review article from freshly minted Dr. Anu Korukonda! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Happy to share that our paper on objective quality assessment for "precision" fMRI is now out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social A recap of what it does, what's new since the preprint, and code you can run on your own data. cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Cozy summer evening .

How do syntax networks grow? In this paper by @brigan.bsky.social & Co find a sharp transition in typical language networj development, while children with Down & other language impairment scenarios halt before a critical maturation gap. @ibe-barcelona.bsky.social journals.aps.org/prresearch/p...

Loving life in Viborg!

"The examples are stale – the method is not exciting. There is nothing much here"

Want to contribute? -Submissions should be real sentences from reviews you received. -They should be harsh, funny, or otherwise unique. -One or two sentences maximum. We might make exceptions, but let’s keep it short. -The quote should not identify the reviewer in any way. 1/2

I know this was a labour of love (and blood, sweat, and tears) by my great colleague Susanne Stoll: the first ever tactile maps of the human finger tip! ☝️ #neuroskyence (not really #psychscisky or #visionscience but tagged it anyway 😉) doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

Clever use of a complex behavioral task to show that BLA dopamine tracks emotional salience, not value or prediction error. Threat/Safety cues drive larger, sustained signals than reward/neutral cues. Dopamine in the BLA is very much different than in the striatum.