Nicola Sambuco

Final version now in press at Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience! Congratulations to Rachel for her hard work on this ☺️🧠⚡
trebuchet.public.springernature.app/get_content/...

#JNeurosci: Weiss et al. show that similar pupil dilations can arise from distinct underlying neuromodulatory states, highlighting adrenergic signaling as a key pathway through which arousal shapes cortical dynamics.
https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0898-25.2025

Monitoring gene expression in the brain with a simple blood test?

In collaboration with @jerzyszablowski.bsky.social & his lab we figured out how to do it nonhuman primates using noninvasive neuroengineering of synthetic serum markers.

nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

A recent paper in @natureportfolio.nature.com raised concerns about the lesion network mapping method. Our team of 16 coauthors analyzed >1000 lesions and 34 symptoms and found that "The methodological foundations of lesion network mapping remain sound" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Predator–prey interactions as drivers of cognitive evolution - Nature Reviews Biodiversity The drivers of cognitive variation remain elusive. In this Perspective, Wooster et al. propose the predatory intelligence hypothesis, positing that the complex interactions between predator and prey p...

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Most fMRI studies rely on relatively small datasets, often just dozens or a few hundred people.

This preprint introduces NeuroSTORM, a foundation model pretrained on 28.65 million fMRI frames, over 9,000 hours of scans from 50,000+ individuals.

Exploring the Neurophysiological Responses of Mobile MOBA Gamers: An EEG Dataset for Understanding Gaming Addiction in Natural Contexts EEG Dataset from Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) Gameplay in Natural Settings: A Scientific Data Overview Introduction Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games represent one of the most engaging and widely played gaming genres worldwide, especially prevalent on mobile platforms. Despite their popularity, the neurophysiological processes underlying MOBA gameplay and their links to gaming addiction remain insufficiently understood. Addressing this gap, a recent open-access study published in…

Exploring the Neurophysiological Responses of Mobile MOBA Gamers: An EEG Dataset for Understanding Gaming Addiction in Natural Contexts

EEG Dataset from Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) Gameplay in Natural Settings: A Scientific Data Overview Introduction Multiplayer Online Battle Arena…

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!

We've posted a new fMRI study examining attention across tasks. We compare semantic representations during movie watching to those during naturalistic navigation. We show that attention in different contexts alters semantic representations to optimize performance.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/7 Can infants recognise the world around them? 👶🧠 As part of the FOUNDCOG project, we scanned 134 awake infants using fMRI. Published today in Nature Neuroscience, our research reveals 2-month-old infants already possess complex visual representations in VVC that align with DNNs.

😶

The project is so cool that I wish I’d be younger and apply. Also..what a great combo we could make with our last names 😂 (a joke that only Italians would understand)

As we argued in earlier work, we can benefit from extending tasks to more naturalistic settings.

www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

This paper takes a step toward that broader goal by integrating RL, perceptual inference, and decision dynamics in VR.

This is figure 2, which shows downstream application performance comparison.

Artificial intelligence applied to brain MRI could transform neurological care. A paper in Nature Neuroscience presents BrainIAC, a foundation model that can be used across diverse clinical tasks with limited training data. go.nature.com/3O5cwQy #Neuroskyence #medsky 🧪

Slot-Based Writing: The Cure for Scientific Paper Paralysis If you’re a scientist and you’ve ever opened a blank doc to start a paper and immediately regretted your life choices, you’re not alone…

If you’re a scientist and you’ve ever opened a blank doc to start a paper and immediately regretted your life choices, you’re not alone. Here's my method. Read "Slot-Based Writing: The Cure for Scientific Paper Paralysis" on Medium medium.com/@myassa_6289...

𝗦𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲-𝗳𝘂𝗻𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗥𝗡𝗡𝘀
Interesting paper looking at "spatially embedded" recurrent networks and function.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
#neuroskyence

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...

Are memories in your brain distributed or local? How did early experiments in the late 1940s address this? Join me this week with neuroscientist Nicole Rust (nicolecrust.bsky.social), author of "Elusive Cures", as we discuss the modern emerging picture of the brain.
eagleman.com/podcast/141

New research using ABCD Study data (n=10,164) suggests the "bilingual advantage" in cognition might actually be an "SES advantage."

#Bilingualism #Cognition #Education

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The Role of Memory in Temporal Discounting A widely observed phenomenon in intertemporal choice is temporal discounting; people prefer to have rewards sooner rather than later, even if the delayed rewards are larger. Despite the universality o...

So excited that this textbook, edited by @dfareri.bsky.social @dvsmith.bsky.social & @thepsychologist.bsky.social is out now! And so happy to have been invited to contribute. Here’s my chapter on the role of memory, esp. semantic memory, in temporal discounting: link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

🎉 New paper in Nature Communications 🎉

rdcu.be/e24jT

Does our environment influence how likely we are to help others?

Full dopamine coding of basic economic subjective value: Utility and weighted probability Behavioral choices of uncertain rewards suggest that agents construct subjective reward value by combining the basic value components of utility and w…

I like to think about brain areas as well behaved (b/c they do what you tell them too, like V1) vs naughty (b/c 🤷, like PFC).

I'm delighted to learn that midbrain dopamine neurons are well behaved machines that convert objective value into subjective value.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New Special Issue out in #AddictionNeuroscience edited by @talialerner.bsky.social on dopamine circuitry and heterogeneity in addiction with articles by @daylab.bsky.social, Tom Hnasko, @mtorregrossa1.bsky.social, and Awatramani Rajeshwar check it out! www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords “kiki” and “bouba” with spiky and round shapes, respectively, a phenomenon named the bouba-kiki effect. To explore the origin of t...

“Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords kiki & bouba with spiky & round shapes, respectively...We tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby chickens. Similar to humans, they spontaneously chose a spiky shape when hearing a kiki sound & a round shape when hearing a bouba.”😲🧪

Can a preprint be a drug? I am so here for place cells being reduced to a neuroscientific afterthought.

What episodic memory reveals about the default mode network osf.io/preprints/ps...

Hippocampal trace coding dominates and disrupts place coding https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.17.706430v1

Neuroblox

Innovations and Inventions at @picowerinstitute.bsky.social Neuroblox
picower.mit.edu/innovations-...
#neuroscience

The Brain Resilience Study protocol: Building a dataset of the biological and sociocultural factors affecting brain health in older adults Dementia arises from a complex interplay of biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors. However, previous large-scale studies have largely f…

Here is the link to our "The Brain Resilience Study protocol," an ongoing project through the @sfuneuro.bsky.social

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...