Update: the book is now officially out! Neuroeconomics: Core Topics and Current Directions is available from Springer here: link.springer.com/book/10.1007... Huge thanks again to @thepsychologist.bsky.social, @dfareri.bsky.social, and all of the contributors.

Check out our new review titled "Contributions of default mode network to subjective valuation and maladaptive decision making" now out in Current Opinion in Behavioral Science! @dfareri.bsky.social authors.elsevier.com/a/1n8Js8MqMi...

Where, exactly, does learning happen in the brain? Out today in @nature.com, we identify a synaptic locus of birdsong learning and show that the circuit can be tuned to make birds learn faster - but at a cost. Read on👇 #neuroskyence 🧪 #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics Shareable link: rdcu.be/fiyrS

@nataliemcclain.bsky.social's "Metropolis of the Mind" reimagines the brain as a city. Different buildings (distinct brain regions) are connected by bridges (neural pathways). Collapsed bridges represent neural pathways weakened by #Addiction. VOTE NOW for #ArtoftheBrain Image # 28 👉 Most 🧡s wins!

New Annual Review with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social: “Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is.” We argue that the brain's 'planning' machinery is mostly used for learning from simulated experience, and that thinking prospectively at decision time is just one special case of this process.

🚨Preprint Alert🚨 Our new preprint 'A Scalable fMRI Estimate of Basal Ganglia Brain Tissue Iron for Use in Developmental and Translational Neuroscience' is live!! lnkd.in/gpG9naba

SCORE, a collaboration of 865 researchers, is now released as three papers in Nature, six preprints, and a lot of data (cos.io/score/). SCORE examined repeatability of findings from the social-behavioral sciences and tested whether human and automated methods could predict replicability.

🚨 New preprint from the lab led by Shenghan Wang! 🚨

Excited to share our new paper proposing a new computational model accounting for the dynamic interaction btw drug #craving and #decision-making, led by Kaustubh Kulkarni, MD/PhD rdcu.be/fab6B #AddictionScience #Neuroscience #ComputationalPsychiatry #BehavioralScience

Semaglutide reduces depression risk by 44%, anxiety by 38%, and substance use disorder by 47% (other GLP1s had lower or no effect). That said, it the failed Alzheimer/GLP1 trial taught us something, it's that confirmatory RCTs are essential. linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pi...

Precision reward/affect fMRI study out now in HBM! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... @dvsmith.bsky.social @olinotom.bsky.social @coopersharp.bsky.social and @shenghanwang.bsky.social Intensively sampled task + rest fMRI data with behavioral manipulation openly available on OpenNeuro! (1/2)

New review/theory paper out with Julie Bugg, Chris Nuno, and Changrun Huang. The upshot is that we don’t know for certain why it’s so hard to get people to engage proactive control from trial to trial (but it’s fun to think about it and speculate!).

Discussing The Resevoir this coming Tuesday urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=htt...

Also check out a commentary on these results, which highlights the utility of these drug-biased behavioral measures in clinical addiction research! @narcatms.bsky.social

Go check out our paper illustrating that objective cognitive-behavioral measures can outperform traditional self-reports when it comes to informing clinical outcomes! This is a promising step towards improving the tools we use to assess severity. @narcatms.bsky.social @aoceceli.bsky.social

Excited to share this in final form @sfnjournals.bsky.social: An Open-Source Restraint System for Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Rats www.eneuro.org/content/13/2... if anyone wants to try doing it, give us a call! Happy to help you get going!

New paper from the lab now out online! @changrun-huang.bsky.social asked whether people use informative pre-cues to up-regulate cognitive control in the spatial Stroop task. Surprisingly, they do not, and we rule out some possible reasons why. Enjoy!

I reviewed 5+ fMRI papers on response inhibition within roughly the last year, and the same points come up over and over again. So I wrote a short note last week entitled "The unique limitations of BOLD-fMRI in the study of response inhibition". You can read it here. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Check out our new preprint documenting how Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement rebalances neural responses to drug and natural reward cues in opioid use disorder! W/ Yuefeng Huang, @narcatms.bsky.social, @drericgarland.bsky.social et al @sinaibrain.bsky.social www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

Students need to remember that Inigo Montoya method for emails and greetings: "Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” Polite Greeting Name Relevant Personal Link Manage Expectations Keep it BRIEF.

New work from the lab! With @jameswyngaarden.bsky.social

🚨 Prospects of GLP-1 Therapies for Addiction and Mental Health Comorbidities—Quo Vadis? jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... @jamapsychiatry.com

Wrapping up my 4th #ACNP while savoring this view. Grateful to the presenters as I learned a ton from the panels and posters at #acnp2026. Looking fwd to returning in 2027! @acnporg.bsky.social @sinaibrain.bsky.social

Come talk addiction cogneuro (or anything else really...) with me at poster TH54 @5p! @acnporg.bsky.social @sinaibrain.bsky.social #acnp2026

In attendance with the @narcatms.bsky.social lab! Excited to see old friends and meet new ones. And for everyone to check out poster TH54 on Thursday 5-7p where I'll talk about goals and habits in addiction! #acnp2026

Interactions between striatal–prefrontal & hippocampal–prefrontal systems shape value-based learning & goal-directed behavior during adolescence; asynchronous maturation of these circuits may contribute to vulnerability to mental health disorders

This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!

This is your brain on Ritalin. Got your attention? Stimulant medications like Ritalin (methylphenidate) do, but not in the way you might think. They don't act directly on the brain’s attention systems! Find out what's really happening in @cellpress.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...

Greater automaticity -> greater devaluation sensitivity?? my mind -> blown

"Socioeconomic status (SES) — not IQ or psychopathology — showed the strongest associations with both resting-state functional connectivity and cortical thickness in the ABCD Study." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Hiring a Postdoc at UC San Diego to assist with clinical trials and neuroscience of Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy for addiction. Clinical psychology or psychiatry training preferred. Postdoc will provide psychedelic-assisted therapy sessions, analyze data, and write papers. Competitive salary! DM me.

Hate: Overextending claims about psychology/cognitive neuroscience based on resting-state fMRI

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

Objective estimates of drug-biased behavior outperform subjective drug use measures in predicting addiction treatment outcomes?! Read more about it in our new paper in @biologicalpsych.bsky.social GOS w/ @nataliemcclain.bsky.social @narcatms.bsky.social et al! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Excited to share our new GLP-1 receptor agonist study! Chronic semaglutide potentiates motivation for small food rewards and associated cues, but reduces intake when food is freely available—surprising twist! #GLP-1, #behavior #neuroscience #pharmacology 1/ 🔗 www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

ManuscriptCentral Wrapped! In 2025, you submitted 5 papers AND all got rejected 🎉 You spent 💯 minutes in total trying to submit your papers! You reviewed for 10 journals that would never publish your papers ❤️

Cocaine Addiction Trinity Three subtypes of cocaine use disorder and their neurobehavioral profiles A ‘Relief Type’ with high negative emotionality A ‘Cognitive Type’ with lower executive function An ‘Undefined Type’ with no apparent impairments www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Distributed activity in the human posterior putamen distinguishes goal-directed from habitual control in humans https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.26.690863v1

New lab paper: "Emotional learning selectively distorts the temporal organization of memory: A quantitative synthesis." Across 17 different studies, fear conditioning consistently distorted temporal source memory for information encoded before and after. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

1/2 New open access paper in which we apply the Nyquist-Shannon thereom from signal processing to 2 EMA datasets to figure out the optimal sampling frequency for EMA assessments. 🧪 #psychscisky #statssky www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Very interesting paper framing decision biases as habit-like choice repetitions. I wonder if any element of non reinforced preference change (www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...) is at work here.

Big thanks to @pnas.org Kudos for highlighting our work showing PFC recovery with methylphenidate + memory modulation in cocaine addiction www.growkudos.com/publications...

We have at least TWO postdoctoral fellowship openings on our @unm.edu @casaa.bsky.social T32 NIAAA Training Grant, best consideration date for applications is Nov 15 2025. Join our phenomenal community and enjoy incredible quality of life in beautiful New Mexico. casaa.unm.edu/training/ins...

Excited to share our new paper in @pnas.org!! Combining methylphenidate with memory updating (retrieval–extinction) normalized ventromedial prefrontal cortex function in people with cocaine addiction. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Excited to share this review in @biologicalpsych.bsky.social on using transfer learning to leverage large MRI datasets & enhance precision psychiatry!! www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S000... Fun collab with rockstars @diawang.bsky.social @bttyeo.bsky.social @avramholmes.bsky.social

Our new paper is out! It offers a tool to assess collinearity impact on contrast estimates *and* uses simulations + MID data to show how common collinearity avoidance strategies can bias results. Huge thanks to @russpoldrack.org , M Demidenko, and the ABCD folks. 🔗 direct.mit.edu/imag/article...

New paper out in cognition with @arikahn.bsky.social, @nathanieldaw.bsky.social, Cate Hartley, and @katenuss.bsky.social !! We show that children 👶 use predictive representations (e.g. SR) to guide their choices, providing an account of how they can make flexible choices in a changing world