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

Really interesting work by Bakhurin and colleagues challenging the reward prediction error hypothesis of dopamine: www.nature.com/articles/s41... I love this figure which both echoes and undermines the famous figure from Schultz et al. (1997).

Motivations are like emotions about (what we know about) possible outcomes. Sometimes incentives spur urgency to act, other times to comprehend. Neuromodulatory systems reflect these motivational moods and shape memories. Out now w @jiahou-poh.bsky.social! www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Excited to share recent collaborative work led by Hayley Thorpe published in Molecular Psychiatry: Genome-wide association studies of lifetime and frequency of cannabis use in 131,895 individuals www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Using neuroimaging, @mountsinainyc.bsky.social's Dr. Rita Z. Goldstein, et al. simultaneously examine sex differences & hormonal effects on brain responses to drug cues, and their down-regulation thru cognitive reappraisal, in subjects w/ #SubstanceUseDisorders👉 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Excited to finally share this collaborative effort led by Philip Boone, Michael Talkowski and @abepalmer.bsky.social!

I will be interviewing for a clinical psychology PhD student in the Precision Psychopathology + Dynamic Immunopsychiatry Lab this interview cycle. Please see our website for more info about what we do + share with applicants you think might be a good fit. share.google/uJRyS3NY9Kdo...

Overwhelmed (in the best way!), speechless, and many other adjectives..Thank you, @bbrfoundation.bsky.social for propelling my research in addiction neuroscience with the 2025 Young Investigator Award + thanks as always to @narcatms.bsky.social and Mount Sinai for the unwavering support!

Neat registered report from @mattmattoni.bsky.social @dvsmith.bsky.social @mindimager.bsky.social and @olinotom.bsky.social diving into the tension between nomothetic (group-level) v. idiographic (individual specific) in functional connectivity models. #Neuroskyence direct.mit.edu/imag/article...

I’m looking for a postdoc to join me at UCSD, ideally a clinical psychologist PhD who can deliver mindfulness interventions as well as write papers and do analyses. I have one of the world’s largest psychophysiology datasets of opioid misuse, OUD, & chronic pain. Competitive salary. DM or email.

This will change everything! Finally, neuroscientists have discovered a pill to treat their craving for simple brain explanations. It's very effective, provided it's taken daily, but no one knows how or why. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Ok, reinforcement learning fans: RL is great, but what do we do when there's no obvious reward from the environment? What about perfecting a golf swing or a foxtrot or a musical performance? We may have an answer. A tale of 🐦 🎶 + 🧠. 🧵1/ #bioacoustics #prattle 💬 #neuroai #compneuro

In an MRI study with 45 participants using deep-learning models, hippocampal activity was predictive of experiential choices, such as choosing a song to listen to. For choices involving risk, the ventral striatum and insula were active. In PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Online #fMRI course coming up August 6-8! 3-day intensive with lectures and hands-on analysis for all skill levels. #SPM, #ICA, #DataScience with @vcalhoun.bsky.social and Kent Kiehl. We love teaching this course and meeting students from all areas! Info+Reg here: sites.google.com/dartmouth.ed...

A colossal effort from the NARC lab: we reviewed the recent advances in drug addiction research from the lens of the impaired response inhibition and salience attribution model. A one stop shop for theory, severity, recovery, and novel directions. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Super excited to contribute to this book with our chapter "Enhancing Ecological Validity in Habit Research via Naturalistic Methods" (with Elizabeth Tricomi). Thanks, @dvsmith.bsky.social, @thepsychologist.bsky.social, and @dfareri.bsky.social for organizing! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Changes in Model-Based and Model-Free Control Prospectively Predict Drinking Trajectories in Young Men www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S000...

Challenging the status quo: A guide to open and reproducible neuroimaging for early career researchers direct.mit.edu/imag/article...

9/ Check out the actual study for many more analyses, e.g., phenotypic variation, scan parameters, signal to noise ratio, etc! doi.org/10.1038/s415... Thank you to the editor @meharpist.bsky.social and anonymous reviewers for the many helpful suggestions, which greatly improved the study.

I still can’t believe that all NIH grants to my colleagues at Harvard and Harvard Medical School have been nullified. And that, as a nation, we’re somehow okay with this illegal, arbitrary, and petty act. Just think of the consequences: scientists, students, and patients will all suffer.