Poornima

New preprint with @rogierk.bsky.social @paulbuerkner.com - we introduce "relative measurement uncertainty" - a reliability estimation method that's applicable across a broad class of Bayesian measurement models (e.g., generative-, computational- and item response theory-models osf.io/h54k8

New findings from my lab in Nature Communications suggest that racial stereotypes can lead the brain's perceptual system to temporarily "see" weapons where they don't exist.

Led by: @dongwonoh.bsky.social

Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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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).

Cognitive scientists and AI researchers make a forceful call to reject “uncritical adoption" of AI in academia A new paper calls on academia to repel rampant AI in university departments and classrooms.

With students heading back to the classroom, a group of cognitive scientists and AI researchers has published one of the most forceful and evidence-backed calls yet to reject the "uncritical adoption of AI" in academia:

@ualberta.bsky.social’s Richard Sutton won the Turing Award — the Nobel Prize of computer science. 🧠💻

His work shapes how AI systems learn and reason — powering tools like chatbots — but he reminds us that AI is about “understanding humanity.”

A big win for ethical, Canadian-led research.

Speakers and organizers of the GAC debate. Time and location of the GAC debate: 5 PM in Room C1.03.

Our #CCN2025 GAC debate w/ @gretatuckute.bsky.social, Gemma Roig (www.cvai.cs.uni-frankfurt.de), Jacqueline Gottlieb (gottlieblab.com), Klaus Oberauer, @mschrimpf.bsky.social &‬ @brittawestner.bsky.social asks:

📊 What benchmarks are useful for cognitive science? 💭
2025.ccneuro.org/gac

Here’s my top line overview:

Update: A Trump administration effort to block all funding that flows to outside health researchers was scrapped Tuesday evening after senior White House officials intervened www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

I'm hiring 2+ 2.5-year postdocs over the next few months.

Job 1: looking for someone with deep expertise in computational modelling (reinforcement learning, agent based modelling) on real-world/complex data (closing: 18 August, starting: October-December), www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/52059/

I'm very excited that this is out as preprint. In this study, 370 participants completed up to 30 runs of reward learning. We see that BMI and and Binge eating are associated with distinct RL patterns. Includes hierarchical models using Stan (+ many hours of sampling) and MRI data of an effort task

📢BREAKING: Just left the courthouse for our NIH grant termination case

Judge ruled terminations are “VOID & ILLEGAL”

As a plaintiff, I felt a wave of relief & hope; he acknowledged the discrimination & harm

Closed by asking, ‘Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?’

The Transdiagnostic Connectome Project: an open dataset for studying brain-behavior relationships in psychiatry - Scientific Data Scientific Data - The Transdiagnostic Connectome Project: an open dataset for studying brain-behavior relationships in psychiatry

🚨 Dataset & Manuscript alert! 🚨 The Transdiagnostic Connectome Project (TCP) manuscript is now available @natureportfolio.nature.com Scientific Data! 🎉

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

🧵1👇

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...

📢 #RLDM2025 is nearly here – 11–14 June at Trinity College Dublin ☘️

Join researchers from AI, neuroscience, psychology & beyond to explore the latest in reinforcement learning & decision making.

🎟️ Register now to secure your spot: rldm.org #ReinforcementLearning #AI #Neuroscience #CognitiveScience

🚨 New WP! 📄 "Publish or Procreate: The Effect of Motherhood on Research Performance" (w/ @valentinatartari.bsky.social
👩‍🔬👨‍🔬 We investigate how parenthood affects scientific productivity and impact — and find that the impact is far from equal for mothers and fathers.

My med school textbook says stimulants like Ritalin treat hyperactivity by “stimulating” the brain’s attention and cognitive control systems. We studied children taking stimulants in the ABCD Study, and the largest differences were actually in arousal and reward networks! Check out our preprint!

All NSF GRFPs to students choosing to attend Harvard in the Fall were just terminated

⛔️ UPDATE:

We obtained the full list of NIH terminations at Harvard. Lowlights:

- 659 total grants at Harvard in the NIH-created list
- $2.19 billion in total award value
- $960 million in award remaining

You can view them all using the "Harvard" tab on the airtable

grant-watch.us/nih-data.html

Hierarchical Phenotyping of Psychopathology: Implications and Opportunities for Precision Psychiatry when Biology Could be Associated with both Symptoms and Syndromes As psychiatry increasingly embraces precision medicine principles, there has been increasing efforts to characterize the specificity of biology–psychopathology associations (e.g., is biology associate...

this is nice ... www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S000...

This is just epic! 🧱

Nearly 400,000 LEGO bricks have been used to create this Ferrari 👊

#F1 #MiamiGP #LEGO

A prospective code for value in the serotonin system - Nature Merging ideas from reinforcement learning theory with recent insights into the filtering properties of the dorsal raphe nucleus, a unifying perspective is found explaining why serotonin neurons are ac...

I'm excited to share that the last chapter of my PhD thesis is now published in Nature! 🍾

What drives serotonin neurons? We think it's the expectation of future reward and --- critically --- how fast this expectation is increasing. 📈

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

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Temporal fMRI Dynamics Map Dopamine Physiology Spatial variations in dopamine function are linked to cognition and substance use disorders but are challenging to characterize with current methods. Because dopamine influences blood vessel dilation,...

Interested in dopamine? Have fMRI data? We’ve identified a temporal BOLD feature that carries rich information about dopamine physiology. This measure, obtainable from resting-state and task fMRI, opens new ways to indirectly probe dopamine’s role in cognition and disease. 1/n tinyurl.com/bddyz67b

We're hosting a hackathon in May! This is aimed at jsPsych users who want to learn how to contribute to open source software and extend jsPsych. It's free, and we'll cover travel expenses. Learn more and sign up here:

jspsych.github.io/hackathon/sp...

@lnickerson.bsky.social

grants.nih.gov/policy-and-c...

Remembering Psychology Professor Sam Sommers Sam Sommers, longtime professor at Tufts, studied the psychological causes and consequences of racism

Social psychology lost a giant, and I lost a dear friend and collaborator. Still processing the loss of Sam Sommers, and probably will be for some time. Cherish the time you have with your people, folks.

now.tufts.edu/2025/03/20/r...

a close up of a man wearing glasses and a hat with abc family on the bottom ALT: a close up of a man wearing glasses and a hat with abc family on the bottom

Hey Bluesky! I’m excited to share my new preprint with @matanmazor.bsky.social and @ruvidar.bsky.social, where we show that surface-level questionnaire filling behaviours drive correlations between mental health and metacognition (confidence ratings). osf.io/preprints/ps... [1/14]

Day-to-day fluctuations in motivation drive effort-based decision-making | PNAS Internal states like motivation fluctuate substantially over time. However, studies of the neurocomputational mechanims of motivated behavior have ...

A little bby from my PhD is published!

we did a complex study to answer a simple Q:
do day-to-day feelings impact choices?

A: Yes. When feeling motivated (independent of other stable or unstable feelings) choices changed because rewards seemed greater.

open access link:
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

This paper is a huge one for me, taking years and years to get right. I can’t believe it’s finally out and I am so proud of the way it came together. Thank you to Dr Lebel for her unwavering support!
www.biologicalpsychiatrycnni.org/article/S245...