Ahmet O. Ceceli

Also check out a commentary on these results, which highlights the utility of these drug-biased behavioral measures in clinical addiction research!

@narcatms.bsky.social

Moving Beyond Self-Report in Characterizing Drug Addiction: Using Drug-Biased Behavior to Predict Treatment Completion and Dropout in Heroin-Primary, Medication-Maintained Opioid Use Disorder Drug addiction is accompanied by enhanced salience attributed to drug over nondrug cues. This bias can be objectively measured and is reliable but und…

Go check out our paper illustrating that objective cognitive-behavioral measures can outperform traditional self-reports when it comes to informing clinical outcomes! This is a promising step towards improving the tools we use to assess severity.

@narcatms.bsky.social @aoceceli.bsky.social

An Open-Source Restraint System for Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Rats Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a critical tool for translational neuroscience, but preclinical studies frequently rely on anesthesia, which alters neural activity and limits comparison with human...

Excited to share this in final form @sfnjournals.bsky.social: An Open-Source Restraint System for Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Rats www.eneuro.org/content/13/2... if anyone wants to try doing it, give us a call! Happy to help you get going!

New paper from the lab now out online! @changrun-huang.bsky.social asked whether people use informative pre-cues to up-regulate cognitive control in the spatial Stroop task. Surprisingly, they do not, and we rule out some possible reasons why. Enjoy!

Jspsych may be worth a look: www.jspsych.org/latest/

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...

Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement rebalances prefrontal responses to drug and natural reward cues in opioid use disorder Despite decades of clinical implementation of medications for opioid use disorder (OUD), overdose mortality rates remain high, underscoring a critical gap in treatments that target brain mechanisms dr...

Check out our new preprint documenting how Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement rebalances neural responses to drug and natural reward cues in opioid use disorder! W/ Yuefeng Huang, @narcatms.bsky.social, @drericgarland.bsky.social et al
@sinaibrain.bsky.social
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

Students need to remember that Inigo Montoya method for emails and greetings:
"Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

Polite Greeting
Name
Relevant Personal Link
Manage Expectations

Keep it BRIEF.

New work from the lab! With @jameswyngaarden.bsky.social

GLP-1 Therapies for Addiction and Mental Health Comorbidities This narrative review discusses the current landscape of glucagon-like peptide-1 therapies in the context of alcohol and other substance use disorders, mental health considerations, and gaps and oppor...

🚨 Prospects of GLP-1 Therapies for Addiction and Mental Health Comorbidities—Quo Vadis?

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

@jamapsychiatry.com

#acnp2026

Wrapping up my 4th #ACNP while savoring this view. Grateful to the presenters as I learned a ton from the panels and posters at #acnp2026. Looking fwd to returning in 2027! @acnporg.bsky.social @sinaibrain.bsky.social

Come talk addiction cogneuro (or anything else really...) with me at poster TH54 @5p! @acnporg.bsky.social @sinaibrain.bsky.social #acnp2026

@sinaibrain.bsky.social

In attendance with the @narcatms.bsky.social lab! Excited to see old friends and meet new ones. And for everyone to check out poster TH54 on Thursday 5-7p where I'll talk about goals and habits in addiction! #acnp2026

Striatal and hippocampal contributions to value-based learning in adolescence Neuropsychopharmacology - Striatal and hippocampal contributions to value-based learning in adolescence

Interactions between striatal–prefrontal & hippocampal–prefrontal systems shape value-based learning & goal-directed behavior during adolescence; asynchronous maturation of these circuits may contribute to vulnerability to mental health disorders

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!

Neat! The reward/salience angle resonates with our new study showing that MPH's state effects during learning (retrieval enhanced extinction of salient drug cues), can reshape drug memory updating and corticolimbic coupling (in people with cocaine addiction). www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

This is your brain on Ritalin. Got your attention? Stimulant medications like Ritalin (methylphenidate) do, but not in the way you might think. They don't act directly on the brain’s attention systems! Find out what's really happening in @cellpress.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...

Greater automaticity -> greater devaluation sensitivity?? my mind -> blown

"Socioeconomic status (SES) — not IQ or psychopathology — showed the strongest associations with both resting-state functional connectivity and cortical thickness in the ABCD Study." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Congrats, Karolina!

Hiring a Postdoc at UC San Diego to assist with clinical trials and neuroscience of Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy for addiction. Clinical psychology or psychiatry training preferred. Postdoc will provide psychedelic-assisted therapy sessions, analyze data, and write papers. Competitive salary! DM me.

Hate: Overextending claims about psychology/cognitive neuroscience based on resting-state fMRI

AI-assisted coding: 10 simple rules to maintain scientific rigor These guidelines can help researchers ensure the integrity of their work while accelerating progress on important scientific questions.

AI-assisted coding: 10 simple rules to maintain scientific rigor www.thetransmitter.org/artificial-i... - my latest in @thetransmitter.bsky.social

Moving beyond self-report in characterizing drug addiction: Using drug-biased behavior to predict treatment completion and dropout in heroin-primary, medication-maintained opioid use disorder. Drug addiction is accompanied by enhanced salience attributed to drug over nondrug cues. This bias can be objectively measured and is reliable yet und…

Objective estimates of drug-biased behavior outperform subjective drug use measures in predicting addiction treatment outcomes?! Read more about it in our new paper in @biologicalpsych.bsky.social GOS w/ @nataliemcclain.bsky.social @narcatms.bsky.social et al!
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Chronic semaglutide treatment enhances the incentive motivational value of a small food reward and associated cue in male and female rats Rationale: Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists, such as semaglutide, are increasingly utilized in clinical practice due to their efficacy in promoting sustained weight loss following chr...

Excited to share our new GLP-1 receptor agonist study! Chronic semaglutide potentiates motivation for small food rewards and associated cues, but reduces intake when food is freely available—surprising twist! #GLP-1, #behavior #neuroscience #pharmacology 1/
🔗 www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

ManuscriptCentral Wrapped!
In 2025, you submitted 5 papers
AND all got rejected 🎉
You spent 💯 minutes in total trying to submit your papers!
You reviewed for 10 journals that would never publish your papers ❤️

Cocaine Addiction Trinity

Three subtypes of cocaine use disorder and their neurobehavioral profiles

A ‘Relief Type’ with high negative emotionality

A ‘Cognitive Type’ with lower executive function

An ‘Undefined Type’ with no apparent impairments

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