Robb Rutledge

Neuroscience has a species problem If neuroscience is serious about building general principles of brain function, cross-species dialogue must become a core organizing principle.

The biggest problem holding neuroscience back right now isn’t data or tools, thanks in large part to the BRAIN Initiative.

It’s fragmentation across species. I wrote this to hopefully spark discussion around an issue that can only be solved as a community👇

www.thetransmitter.org/animal-model...

Inside the incredible, infuriating quest to explain consciousness Will brain science deliver answers about consciousness or hit another wall?

Prediction: In 10 years, “hardest problem” articles like this will shift from the challenge of ”C and perception“ to “C and emotions/mood“. The first is fascinating. The second is required to understand psychiatric functions & conditions.

www.scientificamerican.com/article/what...

🌟 Job alert! We are looking for a postdoc to join a multidisciplinary research team working on the Individually Measured Phenotypes to Advance Computational Translation at Yale (IMPACT-Y) study.
postdocs.yale.edu/posts/2026-0...

Why emotion research is stuck—and how to move it forward Studying how organisms infer indirect threats and understand changing contexts can establish a common framework that bridges species and levels of analysis.

My perspective in @thetransmitter.bsky.social on why emotion research feels stuck and how we might move forward—by focusing on how the brain uses internal brain models to shape emotional processing across species. www.thetransmitter.org/emotion/why-...

Looking for a postdoc in #computationalpsychiatry? Apply here to join an interdisciplinary team and work with a large longitudinal transdiagnostic dataset

postdocs.yale.edu/posts/2026-0...

@RobbRutledge @xiaosigu @DrChrisPitt @PearlsonGodfrey @ACNPorg @YaleMed

Very happy to see this out now in @nathumbehav.nature.com - kudos to @magdadelrio.bsky.social who has led this work and nicely brought together data from two very different studies!
article is here: doi.org/10.1038/s415...
and PDF is here: rdcu.be/eZ27x

🎓 PhD Position (Paris) – Computational Cognitive Science, AI & Mental Health

For Master’s students outside France
Project on the computational bases of narrative pleasure 🧠📚🎮

Subtract the emotional element from religion, literature, and art and there would be left the merest dross, an utterly meaningless mass of symbols and responses. Emotionless, man could not produce poetry, music, the graphic arts, or any of the splendid products of a refined culture. The generous sweeps of the imagination that have brought forth romantic movements in the world^s history, the noble aspirations of the intellect that have led whole peoples to seek a higher life, the tremendous activities of organized groups which have spread the best tokens of their civilizations to other lands, the splendid achievements of individual pioneers, adventurers, craftsmen, artisans, composers, inventors, scientists, and spiritual leaders, would never have come to pass in an emotionless world.

There's much talk these days about what's required for "real" intelligence, such as world models and the like. One thing we know about the human evolution of it: it required/requires emotion. That may have been better appreciated in 1938 than today.

archive.org/details/in.e...

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.

My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

WARN-D machine learning competition is live » Eiko Fried If you share one single thing of our team in 2026—on social media or per email with your colleagues—please let it be this machine learning competition. It was half a decade of work to get here, especi...

After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data.

If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition.

eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...

2025: A Review of the Year in Neuroscience Enlightening the brain

Just published my review of neuroscience in 2025, on The Spike.

The 10th of these, would you believe?

This year we have foundation models, breakthroughs in using light to understand the brain, a gene therapy, and more

Enjoy!

medium.com/the-spike/20...

Antidepressant treatment shouldn't be a guessing game. RELMED is working towards using advanced research to predict which medication is most likely to help each person along their individual path to recovery.

Postdoctoral research position in #ComputationalPsychiatry and #EEG as part of relmed.ac.uk trial testing reinforcement learning as biomarker for antidepressant treatment response. www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/... @uclbrainscience.bsky.social @mikebrowning.bsky.social @relmed.bsky.social

Computational Psychiatry Conference New Haven, USA (July 14-16, 2026)

📣🔥Submit your symposium (30 Jan) and poster (12 Feb) abstracts to the 2026 Computational Psychiatry Conference www.cpconf.org

Excited to announce new keynotes: @danisbassett.bsky.social Eyiyemisi Damisah @adredish.bsky.social Guillermo Horga, Frederike Petzschner. See you in New Haven! #CPConf2026

I’m happy to report that the Grand Plan for brain/mind research is in good hands at Yale with
@wutsaiyale.bsky.social & co. They offered up many inspired thoughts about the impactful next steps for brain research and I left optimistic about the next steps for the field.

🚨Friends, we’re happy to share that our book is available for pre-order! 🎉
We aimed to cover all the foundations of the topic in an accessible manner for a large audience.
It could help set up a bachelor-level curriculum on the topic.
Pre-orders are very key for the fate of books: shorturl.at/Dxbif

Computational Psychiatry Conference New Haven, USA (July 14-16, 2026)

🔥🔥SAVE THE DATE!!🔥🔥

Join us at Yale for the 2026 Computational Psychiatry Conference July 14-16, 2026 www.cpconf.org

@xiaosigu.bsky.social @yiplab.bsky.social @shirleybwang.bsky.social @alpowers7.bsky.social

See you in New Haven!

Ten Simple Rules for AI-Assisted Coding in Science While AI coding tools have demonstrated potential to accelerate software development, their use in scientific computing raises critical questions about code quality and scientific validity. In this pa...

Ten Simple Rules for AI-Assisted Coding in Science arxiv.org/abs/2510.22254 - our latest, led by @ericwbridgeford.bsky.social

I think almost all scientific projects should be planned carefully. And I think an app can dramatically improve that. So I wrote an app for that (free for now, if you can fund this let me know). I tested it quite a bit (>8000 users in beta so far). try it: planyourscience.com

Estrogen modulates reward prediction errors and reinforcement learning - Nature Neuroscience Dopamine encoding of reward prediction errors naturally fluctuates over females’ reproductive cycles with estrogenic signaling due to reduced expression of dopamine reuptake proteins.

Thrilled to share our new paper, out now in @natneuro.nature.com, uncovering how estradiol, the most potent estrogen, modulates reinforcement learning and reward prediction errors across biological levels. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#blueprint 1/7

I love this idea. This is the type of public-facing scicomm that gives a scientist a renewed and refreshed perspective on their own work. I champion scientists engaging in ways that fill their own cups here:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

BUT!! fiction writing is a challenge (at least for me). /1

Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying the distinct motivational influences of reward and punishment on cognitive control Human motivation is fundamentally shaped by one's expectations of the reward they could earn for good performance or the punishment they would avoid for poor performance. However, the extent to which ...

Thrilled to share our new preprint highlighting distinct neurocomputational mechanisms underlying how reward and punishment determine adaptive cognitive control - a massive fMRI study and collaborative team effort with the @shenhavlab.bsky.social 🧠

Link here:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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).

Trials for computational psychiatry - Nature Computational Science Computational psychiatry is increasingly delivering causal evidence by focusing on interventions research and clinical trials. Causal evidence could improve patient outcomes through improved precision, repurposing, novel interventions, scaling of psychotherapy and better translation to the clinic.

In a Comment, @docqhuys.bsky.social and Michael Browning argue that the field of computational psychiatry will improve patient outcomes through its increasing focus on interventions and trials. #mentalhealthresearch #Psychiatry

➡️ nature.com/articles/s43...
🔓 rdcu.be/eKp1v

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🚨Out now in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social 🚨

We explore the use of cognitive theories/models with real-world data for understanding mental health.

We review emerging studies and discuss challenges and opportunities of this approach.

With @yaelniv.bsky.social and @eriknook.bsky.social

Thread ⬇️

New preprint from the lab! 🧠
Led by Juliana Trach, w/ Sophia Ou

Using fMRI, we discovered evidence for time-sensitive reward prediction errors (RPEs) in the human cerebellum.

Builds on, and extends, recent work in both rodents and NHPs

🧵 New paper! We studied depression symptoms and goal-directed decisions under uncertainty

@shiyiliang.bsky.social, with @evanrussek.bsky.social & @robbrutledge.bsky.social

Surprisingly, we found that apathy–anhedonia was linked to enhanced goal-directed behavior. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

📣 🚨 Yale Psychology has 3 searches this year!

Links below:

Quantitative link: apply.interfolio.com/171903
Social link: apply.interfolio.com/171989
Clinical link: apply.interfolio.com/171970

Computational Psychiatry Conference Tübingen, Germany (July 14-16, 2025)

📢 Early registration prices end tomorrow 15 April! 🚨

Computational Psychiatry Conference is 14-16 July in Tübingen, Germany. www.cpconf.org

Speakers inc. Phil Corlett, Charlotte Fraza, Andreas Heinz, Georgia Koppe, Jill O'Reilly, Chandra Sripada, Sophie Valk, Tor Wager

Increasing happiness through conversations with artificial intelligence Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) have rapidly become a significant part of everyday life, with over a quarter of American adults using them multiple times per week. While these tools o...

I am SO excited to share my latest #preprint with
@robbrutledge.bsky.social, Chongyu Qin, Zeb Kurth-Nelson, Martin Chadwick, @summerfieldlab.bsky.social, and others from DeepMind:
"Increasing happiness through conversations with artificial intelligence"
arxiv.org/abs/2504.02091

A short 🧵
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