Niket

Metacognition is a term with lots of meanings, especially in mental health. Together with Lena Jelinek and Steffen Moritz, @seowxft.bsky.social has taken on the mammoth task of bringing these different fields together in our latest paper.
Have a read how we think they can inform each other 👇🏼

The respiratory cycle modulates distinct dynamics of affective and perceptual decision-making Author summary Breathing is more than just a vital process for survival — it influences how we perceive and interact with the world around us. Recent research suggests that the rhythm of breathing, fr...

🧠 New paper on breathing and the brain, out now
@plos.org Computational Biology! 🫁
"The respiratory cycle modulates distinct dynamics of affective and perceptual decision-making"
doi.org/10.1371/jour...
We show how respiratory 'tidal computations' alter our decisons!

Heart rate variability (HRV) is one of the widely used physiological measures in psychophysiological research. But with over 100 indices to choose from, how do we know which ones to use?

In our latest paper, we take a data-driven approach to help answer this.

doi.org/10.1111/psyp...
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Top: Experimental set up. Single pulses of TMS were applied to the hand area of the right primary motor cortex with an inter-pulse interval randomized between 6 and 10 s. Simultaneously, the neuronavigated coil position (yellow), electrocardiogram (red), respiratory signal (blue), electrogastrogram (green), and electromyography from the left hand (gray) were recorded. The figure shows traces of a 20-s time segment from one participant of the cardiac (raw), respiratory (filtered), gastric (filtered), and EMG (raw) signals. The experimental measure was the Motor Evoked Potential amplitude measured on a hand muscle (first dorsal interosseous), analyzed against the phase of the cardiac, respiratory, and gastric rhythms. Note that the three rhythms have very different periods (~1 s for the heart, ~ 5 s for respiration, and ~20 s for the gastric rhythm). Bottom: Artwork illustrating how rhythms of the internal organs interact with the moment-to-moment fluctuations observed in corticospinal motor excitability. Image depicts an outline of a brain with representations of the three rhythmic organs influencing the motor system: the heart, lungs, and stomach. Image credit: Tahnée Engelen.

How do internal bodily rhythms influence #brain activity & motor function? @tahnee-engelen.bsky.social &co show that #cardiac, #respiratory & #gastric rhythms independently modulate motor excitability, revealing distinct #interoceptive profiles across individuals @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4nMtpLT

🚨New Publication!🚨 When doing research with transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS), it is important to consider one major potential confound: retinal phosphenes. They may affect your data significantly, which is what we discuss here!

doi.org/10.1016/j.ij...

Preparing for launch 🚀

👉 See edia-toolbox.github.io for details.

It’s getting serious! 🚀😊

Experiments using immersive technologies will get substantially easier in less than 24h - thanks to @flxklotz.bsky.social & @thefirstfloor.bsky.social

#vrcademicsky #vrresearch

Stay tuned!

A gut-brain neural circuit for nutrient sensory transduction A neuroepithelial circuit that connects the intestinal lumen to the brain stem in one synapse has been identified.

biased because I just saw Diego Bohórquez give a very impressive talk but any of his work on gut-brain connections (e.g. www.science.org/doi/full/10....)

Been thinking for a few years about what I call the *replication ceiling*: the maximum replicability of an effect given constraints in data in which replication takes place (power, measurement error, sampling variability, etc). This leads to a maximum theoretical replicability which can be achieved.

This was a fabulous, once in a lifetime colloquium -- and now the videos are available in high quality on the College de France web site @college-de-france.fr
www.college-de-france.fr/fr/agenda/co...
With talks by Edvard Moser, Nancy Kanwisher, Liz Spelke, Manuela Piazza, Luca Bonatti and more!

Today, I teach the (graduate) kids about long-term memory. I'm bringing along my 3D print of HM's brain, made from post-mortem histology. #neuroscience

📣 Out in TINS (@cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social):

Neural processing is often described as either externally or internally directed. In our new Forum article, we (@freekvanede.bsky.social & Kia Nobre) propose a multilevel framework for conceptualising external and internal continua of brain processes.

This is a very nice cross-species articulation of findings and challenges in body-brain and brain-body processing. Recommended reading for anyone interested in dipping their toes into this broad and rapidly developing area!

Have a paper ready for peer review? Consider sending it to PCI Psychology! We are a preprint recommendation platform and recommended papers can be easily submitted to 20+ PCI Psych friendly journals! See all friendly journals here: psych.peercommunityin.org/about/pci_fr...
#PsychSciSky #SciPub

Together with Teresa Berther, @martinasaltafossi.bsky.social, @eliobalestrieri.bsky.social, and @ualsbombe.bsky.social, we have developed a pipeline which uses IAAFT-based respiration time series surrogates to then adapt gold-standard cluster permutation testing for circular (phase-binned) data.

Scientists discover surprising link between gut-brain interactions and mental health Every emotion has a physical side, but one organ has been curiously overlooked in brain-body research. Now, scientists are turning their attention to the stomach—and discovering signals that may chang...

Thank you to @psypost.bsky.social for featuring our @natmentalhealth.nature.com research on stomach–brain communication and worse mental health symptoms
www.psypost.org/scientists-d...
Was also shared on X but with weirdly more hair colour comments 🌈 than the science itself 😅:
x.com/OwenGregoria...

Introducing hMFC: A Bayesian hierarchical model of trial-to-trial fluctuations in decision criterion! Now out in @plos.org Comp Bio.
led by Robin Vloeberghs with @anne-urai.bsky.social Scott Linderman

Paper: desenderlab.com/wp-content/u... Thread ↓↓↓

#PsychSciSky #Neuroscience #Neuroskyence

Symposia Guidelines - Social Affective Neuroscience Society

Symposium submissions are now open for #SANS2026 in San Diego! The deadline for these submissions is November 17th at 23:59 Pacific. Check out the submission guidelines here: socialaffectiveneuro.org/symposia-gui...

Frontiers | AffectTracker: real-time continuous rating of affective experience in immersive virtual reality Subjective experience is key to understanding affective states, characterized by valence and arousal. Traditional experiments using post-stimulus summary rat...

📢Our peer-reviewed article about the AffectTracker is finally out! 😲🕹️📈
Traditional methods for rating emotion often miss the dynamic, moment-to-moment nature of feelings. We designed a tool to capture this continuous affective experience in real-time during dynamic emotional stimulation.

Even after recovery, relapse is heartbreakingly common in anorexia nervosa. Could the answer lie in the gut’s hidden signals? 🧵

Image of a person with their eyes closed holding a hot water bottle. University logo in the corner. Text reads: the relationship between sleep, interoception, and autistic traits - what role does thermoregulation play?

Diagram with handwritten notes relating to sleep, interoception and thermoregulation.

Passed with minor corrections! Thanks to my family for their support, to @drmlfil.bsky.social and @saraslt.bsky.social for their wonderful supervision, and to all the PPI contributors. Thanks to Dr Rebecca Brewer and Dr Helge Gillmeister for a great viva conversation! #interoception #autism #sleep

Long-term ECG data have great potential to expand research into diurnal variation of heart rate variability, beyond short-term measures of resting state. Data processing, however, is labor intensive. Led by Maximilian Schmaußer, we compared the performance of open-source tool boxes 1/2

Very interested, emailing :)

"I feel full with shame": A qualitative perspective on gastric interoceptive sensibility “Am I hungry? Did I overeat at lunch?” Gastric interoception - the sensing, interpretation, and regulation of signals from the gastrointestinal system…

New qualitative paper! A foray into gastric interception. @lucysta02475610.bsky.social ran a LOT of focus groups, across groups with eating disorders, gastric disorders and neither, to understand how people experience the sensations from their GI system. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Emotion research has a communication conundrum In 2025, the words we use to describe emotions matter, but their definitions are controversial. Here, I unpack the different positions in this space and the rationales behind them—and I invite 13…

My new essay for @thetransmitter.bsky.social. Why is understanding emotion so challenging? The debates around what counts as an "emotion" shed insight.

These disputes are multidimensional, principled and fascinating. Here, I unpack them.

www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

The Body’s Band: How Heart and Brain Communicate Illustration of a person with vitiligo practicing yoga, sitting cross-legged and stretching an arm over their head. In a thought bubble, a smiling brain sings into a microphone and a heart plays a dru...

🧠🫀 New from our lab on Frontiers for Young Minds:

Ever wondered how the heart and brain communicate? Think the heart as the drummer 🥁 & the brain as the singer 🎤 keeping the body's band in tune!

Read here (for ages 8–15): kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frym.2025.1536787/full
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ggplot2 4.0.0 A new major version of ggplot2 has been released on CRAN. Find out what is new here.

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN.

It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package.

Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

Always a pleasure to hear the exciting work in a fast presentation data blitz session. From my lab, @oliwiastecko.bsky.social detailing the unexpected journey replicating prior work on memory & the heart. Find out more in poster #4 at #BACN2025

This is an incredible tool for visualizing real-time activity of internal organ system dynamics in zebra fish - I trust it’s only a matter of time until we see a suite of “functional body connectivity” papers during various interoceptive perturbations… #interoception

𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻-𝗯𝗼𝗱𝘆 𝗽𝗵𝘆𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆:
𝗟𝗼𝗰𝗮𝗹, 𝗿𝗲𝗳𝗹𝗲𝘅, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻
Excellent review paper about reactive and anticipatory processes.
#neuroskyence
doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...