We are recruiting! Postdoctoral research fellow at www.sdn-lab.org, studying the computational & neural basis of social decision-making. Birmingham is a fantastic & affordable place to live, with one of the youngest populations in Europe & over 600 parks. Please share! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQO275/p...

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

Incentives are skewed in research publishing. eLife looks for better ways to share and assess research and researchers by focusing on public peer reviews and eLife Assessments rather than publishing decisions. buff.ly/WfmVvbP Interview with Erdem Pulcu at @oxfordpsychiatry.bsky.social

Block that acetylcholine and just doesn't feel worth it any more... Cholinergic modulation of dopamine release drives effortful behaviour www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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...

🚨DOPAMINE2026 (Sevilla, Spain) Looking for someone to share a room with? Here’s the room-share form👇🏻 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Passionate about women's mental health? Interested in brain stimulation? Excited by cutting edge neurotech? Come do a PhD with me! www.findaphd.com/phds/project... (thread)

Diederik Stapel was a massive watershed moment in psychology. However, he was -- and let's be slightly glib here -- some guy from The Netherlands who wrote social psychology papers. The full accounting of the Eysenck case is approx, at minimum, TWO STAPELS. retractionwatch.com/2025/12/03/n...

‼️Now published in @imagingneurosci.bsky.social‼️ (with @judithschepers.bsky.social & @benediktehinger.bsky.social) Do you have RTs in your 🧠📈-data? Fixation durations? How do event-durations affect your data? And how to deal with this? doi.org/10.1162/IMAG... 🧵 ⤵ 1 / 7 🧪 #EEG #fMRI #neuroimage

Counting down to friday! 👀

Very pleased to share our new review in @natrevpsychol.nature.com on integrating cognitive neuroscience and clinical perspectives of metacognition in mental health! With @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social, Lena Jelinek, and Steffen Moritz. (1/3) Web: www.nature.com/articles/s44... PDF: rdcu.be/ePxUG

Research in primate brains has been essential for the development of brain-computer interfaces and artificial neural networks. New funding and policy changes put future such advances at risk, write Cory Miller, @movshon.bsky.social and Doris Tsao. #neuroskyence bit.ly/47MXYLH

🧠 New paper on breathing and the brain, out now @plos.org Computational Biology! 🫁 "The respiratory cycle modulates distinct dynamics of affective and perceptual decision-making" doi.org/10.1371/jour... We show how respiratory 'tidal computations' alter our decisons!

1/4 I’m super excited to share our latest PNAS paper: a 7T-fMRI study shows that functional connectivity between habenula and VTA in humans is associated with individual differences in negative learning bias, which further associates with higher anxiety and depression scores. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

(1/3) Focused ultrasound stimulation is a versatile neuroscience tool. Depending on parameter settings it can safely and reversibly alter brain function, or it can lead to lasting tissue damage. That’s why we have safety guidelines (see ITRUSST: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... ).

Great piece on the absurdity of brute force multiverse analyses. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Evidence from 14 research funding programmes confirms that early winners tend to keep winning (Matthew effect). But the idea that an early setback makes you stronger later doesn’t replicate widely. buff.ly/UEtcRd4

@tobiasuhauser.bsky.social, laureate of the ERC's #ERCengage Award, created a tool with young people living with #OCD; showing how engagement makes research stronger. Read about his experience in the ERC's magazine: buff.ly/dQbMfJz

Check out our latest paper, a collaboration with @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social using gamified computational psychiatry measures to explore brain-behavioral correlates of decision making!

Very proud of @sankalpgarud.bsky.social for this heroic effort studying human affiliation decisions which is now out in @pnas.org 🥳 Check out the thread below for quick summary of what we found 👇

A eulogy for my friend Nolan Williams. open.substack.com/pub/thefront...

𝗔 𝗡𝗘𝗨𝗥𝗢𝗘𝗖𝗢𝗟𝗢𝗚𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗟 𝗣𝗘𝗥𝗦𝗣𝗘𝗖𝗧𝗜𝗩𝗘 𝗢𝗡 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗣𝗥𝗘𝗙𝗥𝗢𝗡𝗧𝗔𝗟 𝗖𝗢𝗥𝗧𝗘𝗫 By Mars and Passingham "Understanding anthropoid foraging challenges may thus contribute to our understanding of human cognition" Going to the top of the reading list! doi.org/10.1016/j.ne... #neuroskyence

MEG Nord returns to Aarhus, Nov 26-28, inaugurating our new OPM lab! Keynotes from @olejensen.bsky.social, James Bonaiuto @danclab.bsky.social, Sophie Scott; sessions will feature both group leaders + early career researchers. Registration & abstract submission now open: cfin.au.dk/meg-nord-2025

MEG Nord topics span perception, cognition, brain development, disorders, and quantum sensors. Abstract/reg deadline will be October 30, 2025. We expect to have a few travel grants available for early career researchers travelling from Europe who submit an abstract or are invited for a talk! 🧠📈

⭐PhD in Cognitive/Computational Psychology⭐, Please Share!! Use Reinforcement Learning and Computational Modelling to study how dis/misinformation affects us (with myself +Tali Sharot). Full funding for those eligible for UK home fees. Deadline 10th Nov. @queenmarycbb.bsky.social

📈🧠 We're looking for brains! 🧠📈 Postdoc + PhD positions are available to help pioneer fetal MEG with optically pumped magnetometers, measuring prenatal responses to sound and light to understand how we start making sense of the world even before we're born. 🐣 Please get in touch to hear more!

🚨 PhD/Postdoc alert 👇 If you are interested in doing a PhD/Postdoc in computational psychiatry (starting Sept 2026), do get in touch by October 4th at [email protected] :) Any inquiries are welcome. To apply, please attach your CV, half page motivation and half page research statements.

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Looking for a PhD next year? Want to come and work on the next generation of OPM-MEG/EEG biomarkers in computational psychiatry? Apply for our MRC iCase studentship with @mkflugge.bsky.social, collabs with @lilweb.bsky.social + industrial placement at P1Vital: www.medsci.ox.ac.uk/study/gradua...

Not that it comes as much of a surprise to many of us, but it's worth emphasizing once again - the 👏 brain 👏 uses 👏 distributed 👏 coding 👏. 😁 Two new papers from the #IBL looking at brain-wide activity: www.nature.com/articles/s41... www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience 🧪

Paper alert: our study using a novel ultrasound stimulation device to precisely target deep brain nuclei is out in Nature Communications @ndcnoxford.bsky.social @oxcin.bsky.social @mrcbndu.ox.ac.uk @ox.ac.uk @ucl.ac.uk www.nature.com/articles/s41...

✨ I’m so excited and grateful to have been awarded an #ERC Starting Grant! 🧠✨ The project aims to investigate how the brain builds and uses cognitive maps to guide behaviour, how emotions shape these computations, and what this all means for mental health 🧠

Extraordinary resource! "Comprehensive recordings from 621,733 neurons in 297 brain areas of 139 mice (12 labs) performing a decision-making task with sensory, motor & cognitive components: a public dataset to understand how computations distributed across & within brain areas drive behaviour."👇🧪

New paper our in @pnas.org, lead by @isabellehoxha.bsky.social with Léo Sperber. We use evolutionary simulation to assess and compare the adaptive value of positivity bias and gradual perseveration in reinforcement learning. Follow the thread below (and Isabelle!) for more details!

In other news, I am now a ✨ COXI ✨ (cognitive scientist in Osnabrück, Germany) www.uni-osnabrueck.de/en/campus-li... I'll be looking for PhD students & postdocs later this year, so watch this space if combining cognitive modelling, EEG & tFUS to study flexible cognition sounds exciting to you 🚀

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

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 .

A landmark volume, The Handbook of Dopamine, is now online: www.sciencedirect.com/handbook/han... Big kudos to the editors, Stephanie Cragg and Mark Walton, for putting this together.

Our new paper is out! When navigating through an environment, how do we combine our general sense of direction with known landmark states? To explore this, @denislan.bsky.social used a task that allowed subjects (or neural networks) to choose either their next action or next state at each step.

A cross-species study captured an emotional brain state characterized by lingering brain activity in higher-order areas. “It’s one of those moments where you’re getting a first glimpse at a vast and complex landscape,” says @deisseroth.bsky.social. By @callimcflurry.bsky.social bit.ly/3U33raF

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

We @smfleming.bsky.social, Marion Rouault and @seowxft.bsky.social and I) have posted a reply osf.io/preprints/ps... to a preprint that recently raised concerns about the validity of associations between mental health and metacognition from online studies. I hope you can take the time to read it.

Excited to share our latest work spearheaded by @anikaloewe.bsky.social & @maritpetzka.bsky.social. 20 min naps increased the chance to solve an insight task if sleep reached N2 stage; but the EEG spectral slope was the best predictor of insight dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour... #compneuro #psychscisky

Your brain doesn’t just passively track time ⏳ - it structures it. In @Science.org we show that activity in 🧠 memory circuits (LEC) drifts constantly, but makes sharp jumps at key moments, segmenting life into meaningful events. (1/2) 👉 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I'm so excited to help bring this Computational Neuroscience workshop to life! Join a fantastic group of researchers in Denmark this August (11-14). We've designed it for PhDs & postdocs to connect with experts and build new skills. Hope to see you there! Please do share with your colleagues!

Are you sure that your Heartbeat Evoked Potential (HEP) effect is real? In our new paper, we show that task-evoked activity can overlap with HEPs, creating false positive effects - unless you correct for it.

Although I totally think this is very true, I feel very sad about it. 🫠

New work from my lab looking at how dopamine neurons are affected by stress and males and females! This paper comes to you through three rounds of major building construction, a pandemic, six months that we could not get TTX, some animal facility shenanigans and now is here on your internet!

Two papers out today on RL in the dopaminergic neurons of the midbrain of mice (one from McGill's new PI @paulmasset.bsky.social). Both papers demonstrate heterogeneity in discount factors! www.nature.com/articles/s41... nature.com/articles/s41... 🧠📈 🧪 #NeuroAI

'Understanding disrupted motivation in Parkinson’s disease through a value-based decision-making lens' Review article by Campbell Le Heron, Lee-Anne Morris & Sanjay Manohar www.cell.com/trends/neuro...