Blair Shevlin

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

new work just out by (now Dr!) Anna Jos in collaboration with
@awestbrook.bsky.social

how do pupil diameter changes track the behavioral expression of flexible versus stable control?

find out NOW in the latest issue of Psychophysiology :

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Individual differences in decision-making shape how mesolimbic dopamine regulates choice confidence and change-of-mind - Nature Neuroscience Differences in neuroeconomic decision-making influence nucleus accumbens dopamine dynamics and reflect choice confidence during evaluation, as well as past and future value during re-evaluation, which...

Dopamine dynamics in the nucleus accumbens core reflected decision confidence during evaluation of decisions in an economic foraging task in mice, as well as both past and future value during re-evaluation and change-of-mind

@perothwell.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Congrats to Brian Sweis, M.D., Ph.D. a new Associate Member of ACNP! Welcome!! 👋

Largest genetic study of cocaine self-administration

The results replicate previous loci associated with human cocaine use disorder and provide novel biological insights, including the potential of pharmacological treatment strategies targeting carboxylesterases

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

King’s Prize Fellowship

For any postdocs who are are looking to transition to independence and might be keen to join us here at @kingsioppn.bsky.social, King's Prize fellowship applications are open (deadline 27 Nov)

👇 See link for details, and feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat

www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/119505-...

Fast efficient coding and sensory adaptation in gain-adaptive recurrent networks As the statistics of sensory environments often change, neural sensory systems must adapt to maintain useful representations. Efficient coding prescribes that neuronal tuning curves should be optimize...

Efficient coding theories often implicitly or explicitly assume slow changes in tuning (e.g., through synaptic plasticity). Arthur Prat-Carrabin has collected psychophysical data showing that it can be fast, and this can be explained by a gain-adaptive RNN:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Change-of-mind neuroeconomic decision-making is modulated by LINC00473 in medial prefrontal cortex in a sex-dependent manner Long non-coding RNA LINC00473 in mPFC alters change-of-mind re-evaluative decision-making behavior related to negative rumination.

New paper alert!🚨📝

Paper: tinyurl.com/2cycsy6d
Press release: tinyurl.com/yur3j2n8

How the brain 🧠 engages in change-of-mind decisions taps into cognitive biases that depend on sensitivity to sunk costs & regret - both of which may contribute to negative rumination…however…🧵👇1/6 #ScienceAdvances

Centaur's performance may be largely driven by learning a good model of behavioral auto-regression—independent of the task. An important lesson for cognitive modelers: higher likelihood ≠ better account of behavior.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Proud to see this one out as Version of Record in #eLife
doi.org/10.7554/eLif... 🥰

A recently proposed «pseudosocial cognition approach» aims at our previous work on the social dimension of paranoia.

The shortcomings of their article raise important questions on how we all connect behavioural models to neural data.

Our letter of response: osf.io/preprints/ps...

summary 🧵👇

Quote from Noel Federman, 2024 ENSS Speaker: "It's a great multi-disciplinary place here, and meeting people working in diverse fields is enriching."

Know a brilliant postdoc? Encourage them to apply for the SWC Emerging Neuroscientists Seminar Series — a chance to present to the London neuroscience community.

Open to postdocs worldwide, travel & accommodation covered, no CV’s or references needed.

www.sainsburywellcome.org/web/content/...

To determine distinct learning and decision-making profiles in obesity and binge eating (BE), we combined ecological momentary assessment (EMA) in a large online sample with a neuroimaging study. The figure shows the elements of the paper.

Binge eating (BE) is associated with reduced but more variable reward sensitivity. The panels show associations of BE with learning parameters and an fMRI-based reward sensitivity measure derived from the cue stage of an effort task (independent of learning).

Our big behavioral precision mapping preprint is out. Based on 1,486,950 observed choices in a reward learning task, we show that BMI is associated with higher and more variable learning rates. Binge eating was associated with lower reward sensitivity. #neuroskyence 🩺
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

KI to recruit junior researchers with a focus on excellence On 25 June, Karolinska Institutet will be starting a major recruitment drive for 20 junior researchers with a focus on excellence and mobility. As one of Europe’s leading medical universities, KI offe...

I definitely never regretted the decision to leave New York for Stockholm and Karolinska - now you can join us: big call for assistant professors across medical disciplines coming up. news.ki.se/ki-to-recrui...

New preprint🔊: Choices about neuromodulation treatments hinge not just on what we weigh—but when. People tend to consider risks before benefits, and timing varies with traits like risk preference. W/ bskyless Brian kim & John Medaglia. Feedback welcome: osf.io/54kfy_v1

Cory is my first Facebook friend to be implicated in a major scandal! Big for us

Neurally-informed modelling unravels a single evidence accumulation process for choices and subsequent confidence reports Subjective confidence in perceptual choices depends on computations occurring prior to and after choice commitment. However, the nature of these computations remains unclear. Current models disagree o...

Our newest preprint is out (doi.org/10.1101/2025.06.05.658071), with @lucvermeylen.bsky.social,Dasha Monakhovych, Cameron McCabe, Sarah-Louise Mannion, @kobedesender.bsky.social, @redmondoconnell.bsky.social, comparing post-decision confidence models against behaviour and neural decision signals...

Guided visual search is associated with target boosting and distractor suppression in early visual cortex Communications Biology - Magnetoencephalography in human participants paired with Rapid Invisible Frequency Tagging reveals that excitability in early visual cortex is modulated to boost targets...

In our new MEG/RIFT study from @thechbh.bsky.social by
@katduecker.bsky.social , we show that feature-guidance in visual search alters neuronal excitability in early visual cortex —supporting a priority-map-based attentional mechanism.
rdcu.be/eqFX7

The interoceptive origin of reinforcement learning Rewards play a crucial role in sculpting all motivated behavior. Traditionally, research on reinforcement learning has centered on how rewards guide l…

For the past couple of years I met weekly with 3 amazing younger scientists @lilweb.bsky.social @debyee.bsky.social @rikepetzschner.bsky.social to share ideas and teach each other. No agenda. It was often the favorite part of my week. Then we started writing. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Mental graphs structure the storage and retrieval of visuomotor associations - Nature Human Behaviour Trach and McDougle show that motor responses can form part of structured, graph-like memory representations.

Thrilled to share the new paper from the lab out today in
@nathumbehav.nature.com, led by the great @jetrach.bsky.social!

"Mental graphs structure the storage and retrieval of visuomotor associations"

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Shifting research focus comes with the risk of reduced impact An analysis of millions of scientific papers and patents shows that the further a researcher or inventor moves from their previous work, the less cited their latest work will be.

A new study shows a "pivot penalty" where the likelihood of being a "hit" (top 5% of citations in that field) or getting published go down the more that a scientist shifts from their main discipline.

I have a few thoughts, some on how this was framed

(🧵)

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Computational characterization of metacognitive ability in subjective decision-making Metacognition is the process of reflecting on and controlling one's own thoughts and behaviors. Metacognitive ability is often measured through modeling the relationship between confidence reports and...

Preprint alert 🚨! Excited to share our new work on metacognition in value-based decision-making. www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/.... We ask whether it is possible to derive a computational measure of metacognitive ability for economic preference choices.

Precise individual measures of inhibitory control - Nature Human Behaviour Collecting an extensive publicly available dataset on four inhibitory control tasks, Gratton et al. show that more than 1,000 trials per participant are necessary to reduce within-participant variabil...

Collecting an extensive publicly available dataset on 4 inhibitory control tasks, Lee et al. show that more than 1000 trials/participant are necessary to reduce within-subject variability and improve the reliability of the congruency effect.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Behavioral, computational and self-reported measures of reward and punishment sensitivity as predictors of mental health characteristics - Nature Mental Health Reinforcement learning task-based behavioral and computational measures displayed low test–retest reliability at the individual level. Also in contrast to self-assessed personality measures, behaviora...

New in Nature MentalHealth! with Vrizzi, Najar, Lemogne, and @mael-lebreton.bsky.social

We tested whether behavioural and RL-based model parameters are test-retest reliable and predict mental health traits.

The result? Not really.

A cautionary tale for comp. psychiatry
doi.org/10.1038/s442...

Two (tenure track) Junior Professorship Chair in Nice, France on:

'Modeling in Neurosciences and Cognition'

math.univ-cotedazur.fr/laboratoire/...

'Mathematics of Life"
math.univ-cotedazur.fr/laboratoire/...

New paper! @khoudary.bsky.social (w\ @meganakpeters.bsky.social) presents a rigorous philosophical investigation of considerations in computational model selection. They then apply their toolkit to a long-running debate over fixed v collapsing bounds models of speeded decisions. Full 🧵 below!

A timeline of cognitive costs in decision-making Recent research from economics, psychology, cognitive science, computer science, and marketing is increasingly interested in the idea that people face…

Excited to share a new Trends in Cognitive Sciences paper that I had the pleasure to be a part of. This is an interdisciplinary perspective on the dynamics of cognitive costs, namely when these costs occur and how they impact our decisions. #neuroeconomics www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Neurosensory prediction of alcohol consumption

Specific patterns of brain connectivity associated with taste and olfactory perception as strong predictors of alcohol consumption in young adults

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Is there a role for noninvasive "network" stimulation (multifocal tDCS) to evaluate candidates for deep brain stimulation?

@lukasgoede.bsky.social says yes – new study here:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

A 🧵

@netstim.org @braincircuits.bsky.social @lead-dbs.org

It'd be helpful to know how many there are. Hard to judge whether Indy and OKC are in the top or bottom half of all markets