Shawn Rhoads

🌟We are so excited to share that Dr. @lauraaberner.bsky.social has been named a 2025 One Mind Rising Star!

This award will support her work using neurofeedback and smartphone interventions to enhance self-regulation in bulimia nervosa.

Congratulations Dr. Berner! ✨

I'm recruiting grad students!! 🎓

The CoDec Lab @ NYU (codec-lab.github.io) is looking for PhD students (Fall 2026) interested in computational approaches to social cognition & problem solving 🧠

Applications through Psych (tinyurl.com/nyucp) are due Dec 1. Reach out with Qs & please repost! 🙏

A big thank you to @pbs.org's Emmy-nominated "Healthy Minds" for highlighting neurocomputational research in eating disorders. Such a pleasure to be interviewed by Dr. Jeff Borenstein, who always asks the best questions. @bbrfoundation.bsky.social

🎉Belated congrats to Dr. @xiaosigu.bsky.social on launching the Yale Computational Psychiatry Unit! Your vision continues to inspire, & we’re so grateful for the community you built at SinaiCCP. Proud to cheer you on & excited for continued collaborations!
👉 www.neurocpu.org

I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.

From symptom-based heterogeneity to mechanism-based profiling in youth ADHD: the promise of computational psychiatry - Neuropsychopharmacology Neuropsychopharmacology - From symptom-based heterogeneity to mechanism-based profiling in youth ADHD: the promise of computational psychiatry

Our #ComputationalPsychiatry review paper is published in #Neuropsychopharmacology! 🎉
We outline how to move beyond single constructs, and what’s needed for real clinical impact, with ADHD as a key case example. Toward adaptive, precision psychiatry👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨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 ⬇️

🚨Exciting opportunity for trainees 🚨

Join us at @sinaiccp.bsky.social for the New York Computational Psychiatry Workshop, a 3-day course (Nov 10-12) for learning methods in computational psychiatry 🚀🧠💻

Apply by Oct 13: form.jotform.com/252448781112...

More info: bit.ly/nycpw2025

#s4sn2025 #sans2025 #sne2025 #cpconf2025

Apply SOCIAL INTERACTION &<br>NEURAL COMPUTATION LAB. The SINC Lab examines the neural and computational basis of social cognition and interaction. We are particularly interested in understanding how social...

We are also considering applications from undergraduate students and Master's students in the local New York City area!

Please check out our website for more information on how to become involved: sinclaboratory.com/apply

📢 My lab at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine is considering graduate student applications this fall

We welcome applicants interested in using computational modeling & fMRI to study social connection

🗓️ Deadline: December 1, 2025
🔗 Learn more: sinclaboratory.com/apply

#comppsychiatry #socialneuro

📢 NEW PREPRINT 📢 We show a metacognitive paradox (not blanket deficit!) in OCD: confidence is persistently lower, but fluctuations track evidence more tightly and are nearer Bayes-optimal.

www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7...
🧵👇

GitHub - jmumford/randomise-prep: Generate design matrices, contrasts, and scripts to set up FSL randomise analyses. Generate design matrices, contrasts, and scripts to set up FSL randomise analyses. - jmumford/randomise-prep

Do you ever wish you could just use python to pull together the files and code for running FSL's randomise? Me too! I made this: github.com/jmumford/ran... It will even replace the numbers in the file outputs with contrast names of your choosing (and replace corrp with 1minusp).

🤖After a fantastic debut in 2025, the Theory of Mind in AI workshop at AAAI is back for 2026!

We invite submissions on ToM in artificial & biological intelligence—across comp sci, cog sci, comp psych, psychiatry & more.

CFP 👉 tom4ai.github.io/AAAI2026/cal...

2025 procs 👉 arxiv.org/abs/2505.03770

EXCITING NEWS! The Dept. of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine's Dr. Laura Berner receives an @onemindorg.bsky.social Rising Star Award for her work on "Advancing Brain-Based Treatments for #BulimiaNervosa"! A HUGE CONGRATULATIONS Dr. Laura Berner!💫🎉 Learn more 👉 onemind.org/award-recipi...

New Open dataset alert:
🧠 Introducing "Spacetop" – a massive multimodal fMRI dataset that bridges naturalistic and experimental neuroscience!

N = 101 x 6 hours each = 606 functional iso-hours combining movies, pain, faces, theory-of-mind and other cognitive tasks!

🧵below

"It's not the end of the world, let's just send it to another journal"

Self-care is overrated—helping others has the biggest benefits for everyone involved

A new 2-week intervention finds that helping others improves well-being more than "self-kindness", with benefits for depressed mood, anxiety, and loneliness due to social connection psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

Computational postdoc ad for KCL funded by the Wellcome Trust on the NEPTUNE project

🧠 We're hiring a computational postdoc!

3+ years with me & @mitulamehta.bsky.social on @wellcometrust.bsky.social funded social cognition/paranoia research at the IoPPN.

Lead & develop computational work, collaborate with experimentalists on psychosis/THC data.

DM for details! lnkd.in/eCMy9Jf5

🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans.

Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning.

So excited to share that my first first-author paper is out in
@commspsychol.nature.com
🎉

In a mini-meta analysis of seven studies, we looked at whether loneliness is related to altered expectations of one’s own and others' emotion transitions.

www.nature.com/articles/s44...
(1/4)

Abstract Oxytocin is a neuropeptide that has historically been recognised for its role in childbirth, lactation, and sexual reproduction. Subsequently, research expanded its influence to include social bonding and behaviors, emphasising its role in facilitating interpersonal relationships. More recent studies, however, have revealed its broader influence, extending to non-social behaviors and cognitive processes, underscoring its ability to modulate a diverse array of behavioral and mental functions. This evolving understanding calls for a critical re-evaluation of oxytocin’s classification as a “social” hormone. The Allostatic Theory of Oxytocin, which integrates both psychological and physiological dimensions, provides an alternative framework that accounts for how oxytocin modulates both social and non-social behaviors. At the core of this framework is behavioral flexibility, which is essential for adapting to dynamic environments. In this review, we explore the role of oxytocin in facilitating behavioral and cognitive flexibility using mechanistic, survival, and evolutionary perspectives. Additionally, we focus on the interactions between oxytocin and other signalling systems that influence behavioral flexibility. Collectively, our findings underscore the benefits of reframing oxytocin’s function in behavior within a broader framework that encompasses both social and non-social aspects. This more expansive perspective not only deepens our understanding of oxytocin’s multifaceted roles but also opens avenues for novel research approaches.

I think it's time to retire the idea that oxytocin is exclusively a 'social' hormone.

In our latest preprint, led by @kjerstimw.bsky.social, we argue that oxytocin should be reframed as a behavioral flexibility hormone osf.io/preprints/os...

New preprint🔊🧓: Why do we trust our friends more? We show that people are more efficient at evaluating information when making trust decisions about friends. This is preserved across the adult life span. W/ @jjfcastrellon.bsky.social . Feedback welcome: osf.io/tkpmv_v1

@mgkumar138.bsky.social presented our work at #CCN2025 from this year’s Conference Proceedings

We examined attractor dynamics in RNN-based RL agents and found that the number of unstable fixed points is linked to suboptimal decision-making in more volatile contexts

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

1. We developed a RNN-based meta-RL framework that models schizophrenia-like decision-making deficits. We see a positive correlation between the number of dynamical attractor states and suboptimal behavior:

2025.ccneuro.org/poster/?id=4...

Reconciling flexibility and efficiency: medial entorhinal cortex represents a compositional cognitive map Nature Communications - How the brain creates compositional cognitive maps that support both flexible and efficient planning remains poorly understood. Here, authors propose a...

New paper with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social in Nature Communications: an RL model that builds a successor map compositionally. The new model plans as well as the best models, and it links components of the map used for planning to neural codes in the medial entorhinal cortex.
rdcu.be/eAofi

Thanks for putting together! Recommending @lauraaberner.bsky.social be added! :)

I made this Computational Psychiatry Starter Pack a while ago and was wondering if I may be missing anyone who has joined bluesky since?

I will add anyone who uses computational models to adress questions in psychiatry research. :)
go.bsky.app/5PTy9Zj

🔖 NEW PAPER ALERT 🔖 Out in PNAS – we used equation discovery algorithms to improve models of human reinforcement learning.

Led by the wonderful Kyle Lafollette with an amazing team Yanni Yuval @roeyschurr.bsky.social and @d-melnikoff.bsky.social

www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

Job announcement 📢

@shawnrhoadsphd.bsky.social and I are looking for a joint postdoc interested in computational models of social interaction!

Interested? If you’ll be at #rlc2025 (or I missed you at #cogsci2025) feel free to reach out with any questions!

apply.interfolio.com/165809