New preprint! How do threat beliefs drive avoidance & what happens when avoidance prevents us from verifying them? New work showing a bidirectional link between beliefs and avoidance! Lucky to work w @ondrejzika.bsky.social @nicoschuck.bsky.social @tobywise.bsky.social osf.io/preprints/ps...

For many Iranian students, Neuromatch was one of the few bridges to the international neuroscience community. Iranian students and TAs have contributed so much to it. Many of us, including me, found neuroscience through Neuromatch. This decision by Trump’s gov is cruel, unjust and a loss for science

We are looking for two Research Assistants to conduct experiments and data analyses investigating the neural mechanisms of strategic and social decision-making using head-fixed (1) and freely-moving (1) behavioural paradigms in mice. www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

👋 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 🙏

New work, now out in PLoS Biology. Using intracranial recordings & EEG, we find that the human STN rapidly engages / releases motor inhibition depending on task context, does so in tight accord w/ frontal cortex, and shows little to no lateralization while doing so. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

🚨Next week's talk at ARC Join us for a talk by Professor Lilian Weber (@lilweb.bsky.social, Osnabrück University). 📅 23 April 11:00 (Local Time Germany) @mpib-berlin.bsky.social or online See the link for details👇 www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/events/45441...

I have just finished reading The Technology of Teaching by Skinner it confirmed two ideas for me. First, the image of Skinner as an “evil” behaviorist is false. Reading him directly, I find a profoundly humanist thinker. Second, he may be more useful than expected in our AI-powered era Few takeaways

🧠🌍 April 11th was World Parkinson’s Day. We recognise the global impact of Parkinson’s and the urgent need for continued research. Women in Neuroscience UK proudly supports the scientists and healthcare professionals working to transform Parkinson’s treatment.

Amazing study and the coolest results (from my point of view!) is that LC norepinephrine neurons projecting to the frontal cortex encode reward prediction error

We're so proud of this one - great to see it out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social now! See Johannes' threads for what we did & found. Excited to be using TUS and what it will teach us about the neural basis of affective cognition ✨

Very happy our first paper using ultrasound stimulation (TUS) to stimulate the human amygdala (BLA) got out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social today! 🎉🥳🔊Great FUN with co-first authors @mirunmigyu.bsky.social @lilweb.bsky.social in @mkflugge.bsky.social 's lab! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

⭐️PhD Cognitive/Computational Psychology ⭐️ Use Reinforcement Learning + computational modelling to study how we form beliefs in the face of unreliable information (with me +Tali Sharot). Full funding for those eligible for UK home fees. Deadline 18/5. Please share! @queenmarycbb.bsky.social

What are the systems in neuroscience that we really have something that we can call “explanation” at all relevant levels, other than reflexive feed-forward like circuits. Here are a few that I would argue are getting there. Obviously not complete explanations but genuinely satisfying.

My close friend/colleague (Dr Pengfei Xu) has published an impressive 7-yr prospective study with nearly 400 young people, showing that functional brain dynamics in early childhood relate to adolescent anxiety and depression. www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S000... #PsychSciSky

Excited to share that @russpoldrack.org will be speaking at @princeton.edu this Tuesday, March 24! Talk: "The Promise and Perils of AI-Assisted Coding in Science" 12:00 PM ET Workshop: "Testing and Validating Code Developed Using AI" 11:00 AM ET The Zoom is open to all (see flyer for details)!

*** New paper from the lab in Nature Comms !! *** “Noradrenaline causes a spread of association in the hippocampal cognitive map” by the amazing @reneecabbage.bsky.social in collab. w labs of Jill O’Reilly, Will Clarke, and modeling from Prakriti Parthasarathy and @tpvogels.bsky.social, see below!

Happy to share our latest study on domain specificity in interoceptive psychophysics!

Today I am excited to introduce respyra - an open-source Python toolbox for respiratory tracking experiments in interoception research! Now on PyPI (pip install respyra) with a preprint on PsyArXiv: osf.io/preprints/ps... GitHub: github.com/embodied-com...

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 🧠