Aamir Sohail

🚨 New preprint: What does the research landscape of behavioral reinforcement learning look like 🌍?

We developed an LLM-powered bibliometric analysis to characterize article clusters, investigate their connections, and examine the distribution of topics across the landscape.

osf.io/6c2va_v1

🚨 Last Minute Spots Now Available🚨

Last minute spots became available for this year's @biodgps-dgpa.bsky.social Young Scientist Retreat🧠!

If you want to come to Hamburg next week register vie email:
📧sarah.danboeck@uni-mannheim.de

Strongly Recommend!🙌
#Biopsychology #YoungScientists

Really excited to share a review I contributed to, out now in @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social. We explore how foraging can offer a framework for studying brain and behaviour in natural contexts. It’s been a pleasure working with colleagues across species and disciplines on this. Check it out! 👇

Schematic summary of key findings and proposed mechanisms from Rossetti et al. (2025) regarding the interaction between circulating platelets and cerebral neurovascular function in healthy ageing.

A Journal Club by Rodrigues and Sobrinho on our recent paper "Evidence for control of cerebral neurovascular function by circulating platelets in healthy older adults" in @jphysiol.bsky.social
physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

📢 New preprint 📢
(with Daniil Luzyanin)

We use a new task to distinguish between the instantaneous and instrumental (goal-oriented) value of the same choice option in the brain using fMRI: biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Acute isolation is associated with increased reward seeking and reward learning in human adolescents - Communications Psychology This study shows that, following social isolation, adolescents show increased sensitivity to rewards during effort-based decision making and reward learning. Access to virtual social interactions duri...

Following social isolation, adolescents show increased sensitivity to rewards during effort-based decision making and reward learning.
@livia-tomova.bsky.social @sjblakemore.bsky.social @emilyanntowner.bsky.social @stepalminteri.bsky.social @lei-zhang.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Relying on PRIME young adults limits cognitive science Cognitive science has made remarkable strides in understanding cognition and behaviour. However, a critical issue persists. Most studies focus on PRIME populations – young adults who are productive, r...

“Relying on PRIME young adults limits cognitive science” www.cell.com/trends/cogni... new @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social piece with @connectedmindslab.bsky.social we highlight how a focus on young adults as a benchmark of ‘human’ behaviour has shaped cognitive science in several ways 👇

🙌Thank you for a great Symposium at #PuG2025 on using computational models and MRI to better understand dynamics of social learning! @hein-lab.bsky.social @jgutzeit.bsky.social Bianca Schubert and Lei Zhang! @biodgps-dgpa.bsky.social

Excited to join Association for Psychological Science as an Editorial Fellow, to handle submissions and learn the publication processes at APS!

Just 4 weeks until the abstract deadline for Curiosity, Information Seeking & Exploration - ciseconf.github.io/CISE_2025/

🗓️ 30th Sept-1st Oct
📍 Brown University
👥 Romy Frömer, @hayleydorfman.bsky.social, Ohad Dan, Matt Nassar, Tali Sharot & Jacqueline Gottlieb
👇 Speakers

Please submit & share!

Day 2 of the first @chbh.bsky.social hackathon 🧠🤓 Thanks for a fun talk on your MATLAB journey @dagmarfraser.bsky.social

Played a small part in this exciting interdisciplinary work led by Gabriella Rossetti, @christakou.bsky.social and others at the University of Reading.

It's finally published, so give it a read!👇🏼

Enjoyed providing a gentle introduction to R as part of a workshop organised by @lei-zhang.bsky.social and CENTRE-UB

Materials available here which I aim to expand in future!

#R #openscience

At this point in my #Pint25 talk I was regaling the audience, who understandably thought they had come to a science talk, with a brief diversion into the cultural influence of world religions on our perception of prosociality and wealth. Scientists do not operate in a vacuum! (Well arguably some do)

🎓 Get PAID to co-create open-access teaching materials!

We're launching a funded initiative to make open science education more inclusive and accessible beyond elite institutions and the Global North.

Contribute a set of materials and earn €400. 🧵

Dorsomedial and ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions differentially impact social influence and temporal discounting The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is involved in economic and social decision-making in humans but the specific functions of its subregions are not clear. This study shows that the dorsal mPFC is ca...

🧠 My second PhD paper out 🧠

What causal roles does the mPFC play in social influence and temporal discounting?

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Deadline extended to 28th April!! Summer School in Computational Social Cognition with fantastic keynotes by Matthew Rushworth, @dianatamir.bsky.social and @davidamodio.bsky.social. Come & learn more about computational modelling, make new friends, & explore the UK's 2nd largest city 🙂👇. Please RT!

Adult age differences in the integration of values for self and other - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Adult age differences in the integration of values for self and other

🎉 New paper out in #ScientificReports! We studied how younger & older adults integrate self- and other-related values during decisions. Huge thanks to the amazing team! 🙌 Read more: www.nature.com/articles/s41... #prosocial #aging #DDM @anrei.bsky.social

1/n 🆕📄: How do children learn to adapt to different environments when making repeated choices? And what do cognitive immaturity and probability matching have to do with it? Our new article explores how kids & adults differ in probability learning across statistical task structures: mpib.berlin/R3RFy

Functional Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy Symposium II: 31st August – 2nd September 2025 To be held in Bangor Gwynedd, in lovely North Wales. This year the fMRS symposium will be held jointly (one after the other) with the 9th GABA and Edited MRS symposium. We therefore invite all inte…

The second fMRS symposium (Sept 2025) is now open for early registration and abstract submission. Hosted at Bangor Uni, situated in beautiful north Wales, not to be missed if you're into measuring dynamic neurophysiology/neurotransmitters and cutting-edge MR spectroscopy methods. shorturl.at/Q1A5p

Crowdsourced factchecks really only work with balanced communities, but these are increasingly self-selected by platform.
— @lewan.bsky.social at "Fake News and Democracy in the Digital Age" with Club Alpbach London.

#London #misinformation #fakeNews #media #platforms

Why I value peer review Nature Human Behaviour - Patricia Lockwood discusses why she values peer review and participating in the peer review process, despite some of the challenges.

Why I value peer review - new World View in @naturehumbehav.bsky.social tinyurl.com/4w5795ua I discuss why peer review is still important and useful despite some of the challenges, and reflect on some personal peer review experiences. Interested to hear what others think about peer review 🙂.

Computational analysis of US congressional speeches reveals a shift from evidence to intuition - Nature Human Behaviour This research explores the linguistic traces of evidence-based reasoning and intuitive decision-making in congressional speeches from 1879 to 2022. The analysis suggests that evidence-based language h...

Examining Congressional speeches from 1879 to 2022, @aroyehuns.bsky.social @lewan.bsky.social et al. suggest that evidence-based language has continued to decline since the mid-1970s, together with a decline in legislative productivity. @bristoluni.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A fantastic discussion on misinformation, AI and democracy by our panellists @lewan.bsky.social, @scientificdiscovery.dev, Jonathan Bright and @jenskoedmadsen.bsky.social, and moderator Matteo Bergamini MBE @shoutoutuk.bsky.social.

Thanks to Club Alpbach London for hosting this event!

📚 VALID: A Checklist-Based Approach for Improving Validity in Psychological Research journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Sample size matters when estimating test–retest reliability of behaviour - Behavior Research Methods Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) are a commonly used metric in test–retest reliability research to assess a measure’s ability to quantify systematic between-subject differences. However, est...

Sample size matters when estimating test–retest reliability of behaviour (in 2-alternative, instructed reversal learning).
So say Brendan Williams, Lily FitzGibbon, Dan Brady, and I.
link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Looking forward to hosting this event with Club Alpbach London!

Featuring a great panel: @lewan.bsky.social, @scientificdiscovery.dev, @jenskoedmadsen.bsky.social, and Jonathan Bright, with Matteo Bergamini MBE from @shoutoutuk.bsky.social as moderator!

We are also recruiting new Lecturers, including in Cognitive Neuroscience. Join us!
jobs.reading.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

🚨 New paper 🚨

Out in @commspsychol.bsky.social: "Manipulating attention facilitates cooperation" with Claire Lugrin and @ccruff.bsky.social

We use gaze data and display manipulations in one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma games and find that these manipulations can drive choices through attention 👇

Basis functions for complex social decisions in dorsomedial frontal cortex - Nature A study combining group decision-making tasks with fMRI shows that the brain’s dorsomedial prefrontal cortex uses basis functions, similar to those in the visual, motor and spatial domains, to re...

New paper “Basis functions for complex social decisions in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex” in @nature.com led by @mkwittmann.bsky.social with many others. We show basis functions code relations between people, similar to their role in other perceptual and motor domains www.nature.com/articles/s41...