New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵 rdcu.be/eVZ1A

“These results demonstrate a generalizable small-magnitude effect of lower cognitive performance aligning with school vacation even after adjusting for socioeconomic status or ADHD diagnosis.” www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

AI-assisted coding: 10 simple rules to maintain scientific rigor www.thetransmitter.org/artificial-i... - my latest in @thetransmitter.bsky.social

🧠💸 Launching the RewardSignals feed RewardSignals is a custom feed collecting posts about reward processing and decision making. To appear in the feed, tag your post with #RewardSignals. You can find and pin the feed from the Feeds tab as “RewardSignals”. #RewardSignals

Very excited to hear about this! We find Bayesian multi-level modeling at the ROI level super helpful (e.g. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... ), will be nice to not have to artificially carve the data into parcels a priori!

It's time to remove laptops from classrooms. 24 experiments: Students learn more and get better grades after taking notes by hand than typing. It's not just because they're less distracted—writing enables deeper processing and more images. The pen is mightier than the keyboard.

🚨 New and ongoing work from my lab will be at #SfN25! If you’re attending, come by our posters to talk social decision making, reward, and mood — details in the thread 👇

Super pleased with this one, led by the amazing PhD student and foraging expert @emmavscholey.bsky.social!

🚀 New paper (open access) out in Cognitive Therapy & Research: we (@herzog.bsky.social, @evalottabrakemeier.bsky.social, @hudsongolino.bsky.social and me) ask whether group‑level symptom‑change networks in CBT actually capture what happens inside each patient. #Psychology #CBT

Is social media to blame for teens’ mental health decline? Intuition says yes—but RCTs find only small short-term effects when users quit. This new preprint argues these studies don’t prove social media isn’t to blame. Here’s why: 3 reasons.

Really delighted to share our new article in Current Biology showing that the cingulate-to-dorsolateral prefrontal pathway is not involved in trial-to-trial short-term adaptation but rather in sustained motivational control. doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...

I am recruiting a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara for an NIH-funded project on the organization of lateral PFC function--across emotion and cognition--using representational fMRI & TMS. I’d love to find someone w/ a background in cognitive control & computational modeling to complement our team! 🏝️ 🧠 🧲

Looking for a PhD? Interested in cognitive computational neuroscience, motivation and decision-making? See our project listed in the BBSRC MIBTP competition for funding for a 4-year PhD in the @msnlab.bsky.social in the @thechbh.bsky.social. Deadline 27/11. More info: tinyurl.com/5d5vz8m7

This article is quite good and balanced, but I find these numbers pretty insane.

Next Week: Don’t miss @angeladuckworth.bsky.social & @katymilkman.bsky.social in conversation with Nobel Laureate @rthaler.bsky.social and Professor @aleximas.bsky.social about their new book, The Winner’s Curse. 📅 Thurs Oct 23 | 4-5PM 📍 Huntsman Hall G06 📩RSVP: https://bit.ly/4nbI9EG

Out today at Neuron, our experiments show that frontal cortical representation of economic variables is jointly determined by spatial organization and downstream connectivity of neurons, revealing a structured, multi-scale code for economic variables. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

“We propose a new model in which public communication and advocacy are considered as essential to our mission as rigor and reproducibility—critical not only for safeguarding science, but also for ensuring that its benefits reach all segments of the societies we serve” www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'm interviewing applicants for clinical psych for this next cycle! Come to South Bend to study how and why people use substances in their everyday lives Learn more about the lab: spiel-lab.nd.edu Learn more about our program: psychology.nd.edu/graduate/are...

Nature Reviews Psychology is encouraging authors to include a citation diversity statement to draw attention to citation imbalances and confirm that they made efforts to cite publications from a diverse group of researchers. Read more in our editorial: go.nature.com/4mTIpr2

Congratulations to the 2026 APS Mentor Award recipients 🎉 John F. Dovidio, @kathyhirshpasek.bsky.social, Marci Lobel, Paul A.M. van Lange, John R. Weisz

We're a month further into the job market - how are things looking? The good news is that the market does seem to have been delayed: ~150 new listings have appeared since my last post. The bad news is that the total is still substantially lower than what it was during the covid dip.

📊 Attending #SNE2025? Check out @jameswyngaarden.bsky.social 's poster this afternoon (Session 1): P1.E.17 – Trait reward sensitivity and behavioral motivation shape DMN–striatal connectivity during reward anticipation Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... @socforneuroecon.bsky.social

🚨 New from the lab! Excited to share work led by @jenyangyi.bsky.social, debuting today at #SNE2025 (Poster Session 1): P1.F.38 – Emotion regulation and age shape trustee identity–related decision bias in the trust game Come check it out this afternoon! @socforneuroecon.bsky.social

Reward-reset interval timing drives patch foraging decisions through neural state transitions in dorsomedial striatum https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.29.679309v1

NIH will spend its full $48B budget — but multi-year funding means fewer projects, record-low grant success, and a warning for U.S. science.👉 lfdn.org/3KOs2hT 💜Learn how you can support NIH funding: www.lustgarten.org/forging-ahead #ResearchMatters

💬 Viewpoint: Academic medicine should adopt the "s-index" to recognize and reward nonresearch contributions like service, mentorship, and diversity initiatives, promoting equity and improving faculty retention. ja.ma/4nRApYo

Here is NIDA They were relatively effective in maintaining R01 numbers with little or no multi-year funding, but substantially increased UG1, UG3, and U24 cooperative agreements. 11/n

Here is NIA. NIA made on 51% as many new R01 awards in FY25 compared with FY24. 7/n

New work led by @mattmattoni.bsky.social “Overall, results suggest that BOLD activation to reward tasks, and likely other fMRI tasks, is more appropriate for within-person study than between-person study, highlighting a need for intensive longitudinal neuroimaging designs.”

🚨🚨New precision imaging study and open dataset 🚨🚨 Featuring almost 200 functional runs acquired in 3-4d intervals and behavioral manipulations focused on intraindividual study of the reward response - The Night Owls Scan Club (NOSC) With @dvsmith.bsky.social and @olinotom.bsky.social!

UCLA’s funds reinstated after yesterday’s court order! Thanks to the brave researchers and their amazing counsel, including Dean Chemerinsky, who brought suit. This is just another turn in the ongoing fight, but a great result for now.

This was such a fun project! Dozens of philosophers wrote philosophical arguments trying to get people to donate more to charity, and we ask: Do any of these work? Which ones work best? Why?

PELICAN: a Longitudinal Image Processing Pipeline for Analyzing Structural Magnetic Resonance Images in Aging and Neurodegenerative Disease Populations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.20.677546v1

🚨We're hiring!🚨 The Dept of Psychology at Rutgers is hiring an Assistant Professor in Social Psychology. Review of applications begin on Oct 18. Details here: jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/259... I'm chairing the search committee and am happy to field questions about the position. 🧵

Updating my analysis now that August data should be relatively complete. Not great news... The rate of investment of the appropriation is not increasing and it seems unlikely that the entire appropriation will be committed this year. 1/2

The Department of Psychology at Tufts University is conducting a search for an Assistant or Associate Professor of Computational Psychology with a focus on Artificial Intelligence, beginning September 1, 2026. Details can be found here: apply.interfolio.com/172807.

If I’m understanding right, Aaron Clauset at Peer Review Congress showing that the strongest correlate of peer review outcomes at Science and Science Advances is the prestige of authors’ institutions. Also pretty big association with author geography, not much with author gender. #PRC10

Wow what a rich dataset! Amazing work @jungheejung.bsky.social !

Some "good for now" news reported by @jocelynkaiser.bsky.social in case you didn't catch it last week. With some good advice from @scott-delaney.bsky.social. www.science.org/content/arti...

This is an exquisite demonstration of using intracranial recordings in humans to validate our findings that amygdala neurons encode the value of exploring in NHPs. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

PCI-Psychology just start accepting submissions. If you go through their peer review and get endorsed, you can automatically publish with PCI affiliated journals requiring no additional peer review. Some have a quick internal check decision process. psych.peercommunityin.org

As of late last month, the investigation—led by US senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat of Georgia—had unearthed 41 cases of physical and sexual abuse; 14 involving pregnant detainees and 18 involving children.

New work from the lab led by @jenyangyi.bsky.social !

New 📰 Demand characteristics are a fundamental methodological concern in research with humans Yet little is known about the magnitude and consistency of these effects In a new paper, I, M. Wyatt, and @mcxfrank.bsky.social take stock of what we’ve learned via meta-analysis doi.org/10.1525/coll...

New PNAS paper: "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly" www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

New preprint🔊🧓: Why do we trust our friends more? We show that people are more efficient at evaluating information when making trust decisions about friends. This is preserved across the adult life span. W/ @jjfcastrellon.bsky.social . Feedback welcome: osf.io/tkpmv_v1

Applying for graduate studies in psychology and neuroscience can be challenging and confusing. Frequently, applicants have some support from mentors at their home institutions, but sometimes applicants are looking for additional reassurance, feedback, or perspectives on the processes.

My new university's logo is a PSI! How frickin cool is that! Help me grow a new lab at in IU Bloomington! We're seeking brilliant young scientists interested in memory representations, neuromodulation & aging. Coordinator: bit.ly/3Hu3UzT Postdoc: bit.ly/4oBZF6j Accepting GS apps in the Fall!

Biggest monthly price increases since the pandemic over four years ago. And the inflation is primarily from federal policy. If it starts feeding on itself and spirals, yeesh. Likely govt response is not to end inflation-causing policy, but to fire statisticians, bury data and lie. That won’t help.

Gen AI is making it easy for bad actors to create fake websites to scam students. Great reporting by @byjoshmoody.bsky.social and @kathrynpalmer.bsky.social: www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...