Ellen O'Donoghue

Tolman's Sunburst Maze 80 Years on: A Meta‐Analysis Reveals Poor Replicability and Little Evidence for Shortcutting In 1946, Tolman et al. reported that rats could take a novel shortcut to a goal after training on an indirect route, supporting the Cognitive Map theory. However, a review of subsequent Sunburst maze...

Can humans & animals really use internal maps to take shortcuts?

Tolman famously said yes - based largely on his Sunburst maze.

Our new review & meta-analysis suggests evidence is far weaker than you might think.
🧵👇 doi.org/10.1111/ejn....

@uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social @ejneuroscience.bsky.social

We are hiring a new Ph. D. student on neuroimaging and/or computational modeling on motivation and emotion. Tübingen is a great place to pursue work on these topics!!

uni-tuebingen.de/fakultaeten/...

Graphical visualization of the research question

Your stomach called – your striatum picked up!

But does this actually happen in humans?

Using simultaneous dopamine PET/fMRI, we show that the gut hormone ghrelin helps the brain adjust motivation to current metabolic need.

Here’s what we found👇
Preprint: shorturl.at/pq4A3

#neuroskyence #🩺

Of course, a massive thank you to Ed Wasserman (for too much to list!), to Hanlong & Rey (for excellent coding of self-reports), and to the reviewers (all of whom provided incredibly thoughtful & helpful feedback).

These findings point to larger issues surrounding the challenges of isolating associative mechanisms among humans (see also McLaren et al., 2019) as well as the extent to which associative learning could plausibly serve as the foundation of "higher-order" cognition (see also Lind, 2018)

(2) At least among humans, associative learning mechanisms might not reliably preclude switch costs (maybe because task switching itself functions as a declarative task set).

(1) Whereas pigeons appear to be "true" associative learners, our human II-learners may have actually been rule-users. This possibility accords with a growing body of literature suggesting that RB and II tasks might not reliably encourage distinct learning mechanisms. Alternatively ...

When trained to switch either between two RB tasks (thought to encourage declarative rule use) or two II tasks (thought to encourage associative learning), humans showed clear switch costs in both task conditions, whereas pigeons showed them in neither. This difference suggests that ...

New paper! Associative learning mechanisms are often overlooked in studies of "complex" cognitive processes. Here, we examined how they participate in humans' and pigeons' task-switching.

psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-... (see also osf.io/3265r/files/... for the accepted version!)

New article by @jaquent.bsky.social and co:

Graded encoding of spatial novelty scales in the human brain

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

1/4 Cockatoos are winning the trash can war against Australians

Human motivation to protect them falls five times faster than cockatoos' motivation to open them, and increasing protections makes cockatoos better at it.

(paper) royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

Job alert! Fully funded PhD position on the link between curiosity and cognition in lemurs at our long-term field site Kirindy Forest in Madagascar @kirindy.bsky.social & @primatenzentrum.bsky.social. This project is part of @rtg2906-curiosity.bsky.social.
Apply here: www.dpz.eu

Adaptive stretching of representations across brain regions and deep learning model layers - Nature Communications How the brain adapts its representations to prioritize task-relevant information remains unclear. Here, the authors show that both monkey brains and deep learning models stretch neural representations...

New paper! Brains stretch representations along task-relevant dimensions. Spike timing is important.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroscience

A beautiful summary of our paper! Thank you @neurosock.bsky.social

New preprint alert!

Cognitive maps are flexible, dynamic, (re)constructed representations

#psychscisky #neuroskyence #cognition #philsky 🧪

Stress drives the hippocampus to prioritize statistical prediction over episodic encoding https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.25.683838v1

Turning corners in built environments shifts spatial attention costs Human attention is typically studied under static laboratory conditions, yet everyday cognition unfolds during active interactions with the built envi…

🚀 New paper! We just took a major step in understanding how architecture shapes cognition.

Our paper shows that something as simple as corners in rooms or corridors can shift canonical spatial attention cueing costs.

Key method? Mobile Brain/Body Imaging combined with VR!

bit.ly/47m6ssV

World's largest rays may be diving to extreme depths to build mental maps of vast oceans Many marine species are no strangers to the depths of the oceans. Some animals, like certain sharks, tuna, or turtles, routinely perform extreme dives, whereas for other species, such behavior has…

World's largest rays may be diving to extreme depths to build mental maps of vast oceans

The work with bats on barren, 7-acre Latham Island was Nachum Ulanovsky’s most complex undertaking yet.

By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/neuroetholog...

So excited that our first major empirical @themanybirds.bsky.social paper is now out in @plosbiology.org!
Leading this big team science project, with our excellent core leadership team, is a labour of love for me, delighted to see our hard work over the past 4 years has reached this milestone!

Me too! 😊 Excited to see what we find -- thanks so much to @marinabazhydai.bsky.social, @pci-regreports.bsky.social, and the reviewers for their thoughtful handing of the process.

Please repost!
We're looking for a PhD student to join us on a project exploring how ADHD is linked to greater curiosity.
The PhD student will be based across Cardiff University and the University of Bath working with @ggoclowska.bsky.social , Kate Langley, and me as part of a collaborative team.

For all who didn't make it to the Cheltenham Science Festival this year, here is the recent BBC Radio 4 All in the Mind episode on the Psychology of Curiosity.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Study poster

Interested in a study to help us understand coping strategies in autism, ADHD, Learning Disability, Social Anxiety, Depression, and Tic Disorder? 🧵 👇

For more information about this study: www.azrieli-anc.com/coping-study...

Please repost! Our deadline is fast approaching for a 20-month postdoc position leading an fMRI project on the neurodevelopment of metacognition and curiosity. Join a great lab with fantastic collaborators! 🙂

If you're looking for a postdoc, come join us at Cardiff!! I can vouch for the research team :)

The curious interpretation of novel object recognition tests Novel object recognition tasks are commonly used to assess memory in rodents. These tests rely on an innate preference for exploring objects that are new or have been moved or changed. However, this p...

Interesting commentary in @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social, arguing that we need to be careful not to always assume that rodents prefer novelty:

www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

🧠📈 🧪

Virtual reality research explores curiosity and spatial memory Virtual reality research reveals that curiosity is key in spatial memory and mental map formation.

This is a great (and accessible) summary of our latest @commspsychol.bsky.social paper, which examines the link between curiosity, spatial exploration, and memory within virtual environments.

www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/view/29...

Paper link 👉🏻: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

"The relationships between curiosity and wellbeing: a systematic review" Alisa Priemysheva thoroughly reviewed the literature to synthesise our current knowledge of how different types of curiosity might affect wellbeing.
osf.io/preprints/ps...