Kelly Donegan

Why do some people feel a “not-quite-right” sensation before they pick their skin?

The first ever systematic review on interoception and skin-picking disorder explores how bodily cues and affective touch might help explain the urge.

#SkinPickingDisorder #Interoception

🧵 THREAD

Action repetition biases choice in context-dependent decision-making - Communications Psychology This study shows that decision biases previously attributed to value normalization (e.g. relative value learning or range normalization) are better explained by action repetition. Repeating an action ...

Very happy that this is out www.nature.com/articles/s44.... Together with @stefankiebel.bsky.social we show that decision biases in context-dependent decision making, previously attributed to different forms of value normalization, are very well explained by habit-like action repetition.

Out now in Translational Psychiatry! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Impaired goal-directed planning in transdiagnostic compulsivity is explained by uncertainty about learned task structure Diminished use of goal-directed (“model-based”) decision-making is a hallmark of transdiagnostic compulsivity, promoting an over-reliance on inflexible and habitual behaviours. However, the origin of ...

Sookud and colleagues found that individuals with higher compulsivity and intrusive thoughts develop a less certain internal understanding of the external world, and this mediates the link between symptoms and goal-directed behaviors.

Really excited to have had the opportunity to write this article !

IU is one of my main research areas so I really enjoyed writing about this paper 😊

JOB ALERT: I am offering a 4-year funded PhD opportunity. The position is specifically linked to the project “Assessing the balance between goal-directed and habitual processing through the course of learning". The project is about learning habits and include eye tracking and pupillometry...

The degraded contingency test fails to detect habit induction in humans In experimental psychology and behavioral neuroscience, habits are considered stimulus-response (S-R) associations formed through extended reward training. Accordingly, habits are assessed using one o...

This article is now published in @plosone.org. journals.plos.org/plosone/arti... New analysis added: seemingly habitual responses are explained because contingency deg didn't work for some participants (in line with recent outcome dev results in our lab and in @clairegillan.bsky.social lab)

Taken together, our results advance our understanding of the dynamics of fun in realistic environments. They also emphasize the importance of using realistic, game-like environments together with highly-controlled experiments to advance our theories of human motivation & learning.

4/4

Congrats Ondrej & failte to Eire ☘️

🚨 I am over the moon 🌓 to announce that I am joining University College Dublin @ucddublin.bsky.social as an Assistant Professor this fall to start the Uncertain Mind (UMI) lab 💫

I am looking for PhD/Postdoc candidates to join (more below 👇 ). Please RT as the deadline is pretty soon 🙏

"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...

B2B Cognition & Mental Health Lab talks, with unintention twinning titles 🎭

Me: The promise and pitfalls of 📱/ real-life data
Alex: The promise and pitfalls of computational modelling 🧮

📍Centre for Decision Science Summer School
@alexandrapike.bsky.social

🚨New pre-print out! 🍂

Using daily gamified smartphone 📱 tracking, we found that reductions in both self- and decision-making confidence precede when people are likely to report experiencing symptoms of OCD.

www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7...

Lucy Stafford - Take part in my research ⬇️Scroll down for links to the BODY experiment and the online surveys.⬇️

I'm looking for ~25 more people with a gastrointestinal disorder to complete an online survey on interoception. You can find this survey here: sites.google.com/york.ac.uk/l...

🙏

Finally, a big shoutout to @adrianhaith.bsky.social, @yuedu.bsky.social, Robert Hardwick & co for inspiring this work & the game! 🌟

Happy reading! 🤓☕

Leveraging cognitive neuroscience for making and breaking real-world habits Habits are the behavioral output of two brain systems. A stimulus–response (S–R) system that encourages us to efficiently repeat well-practiced actions in familiar settings, and a goal-directed system...

The good news? If there’s more than one mechanism driving compulsive behaviour, there’s likely more than one way to intervene! We talk about this in our @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social review @eikekofi.bsky.social @parnianrafei.bsky.social

www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

People higher in compulsivity made the most habit errors - suggesting stronger habit formation 🏋️‍♀️

… but so did younger adults, men & those with more education! Because habits aren’t 'bad'. They’re efficient ✅. Until they're not 🚧.

Time-dependent competition between goal-directed and habitual response preparation - Nature Human Behaviour Hardwick et al. show that habits in human behaviour consist of automatic preparation of an action in response to a trigger. Even though we can learn to control habits to perform different action respo...

Similar to the lab-based version, we found more habits following extended training. And this effect was time-dependent ⏱️, with habits being revealed when you have to act fast

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

Introducing ... 🥁🥁🥁... COGQUEST

Training habits = lots of trials + multiple in-lab visits. Burdensome & inaccessible 🥱🚫 That’s why we gamified a habit task via @clairegillan.bsky.social's Neureka app

1000 people trained habits over a week, while also reporting on their mental health. All without stepping foot inside the lab!

🚨PREPRINT ALERT🚨

Why do some people get stuck doing things that no longer make sense, or are even harmful? Our new study shows compulsivity isn’t just about weakened goal-directed control; people high in compulsivity also form stronger habits

📄: osf.io/preprints/ps...

#PaperFairy #Habits #CogSci

New preprint! Habits should get stronger with more practice, right? Well, this crucial result has been difficult to reproduce in human labs. In an instant classic, de Wit (2018) showed 5 failures in obtaining more evidence of habits in conditions with more training -as compared to little trained

I promise I missed the #CPConf2025 Travel Award photo because I was boarding my ✈️ and NOT due to punting 🛶 .. Grateful for the opportunity to present my work 📱, met up with friends & eat delicious german apple cake

Come to my fan-tastic poster at #CPConf2025 🪭 Poster 35 to find out all things habits, gamification or to get a quick cool down 🥵

What does this tell us? At least some of the implicit assumptions when advocating for the use of computational models in psychiatry are not met for these popular tasks and computational models -> limiting utility.

🚨 New paper alert!
Do time constraints reveal habitual behaviour? 🤔 We directly compared two major paradigms in the habit research field (Outcome Devaluation vs Response Remapping) under identical training and forced-response conditions 🧠 ⏲️ ⌨️

preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Me: "What did you learn at journal club today?"

Intern: "That one day I'm going to publish a paper, and a bunch of people are going to sit around a table and rip it apart."

The way we feel affects the way we think. Can we find evidence for this in real-world mood and cognitive performance? For a few weeks, we followed people through their daily lives on their smartphones to answer this question! 📱🌍🧠 #neuroskyence

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Very happy to see this published open-access in Behavior Research Methods now 🤗
#neuroskyence
doi.org/10.3758/s134...

Touched down in the motherland 🇮🇪 for #RLDM2025 Excited to be apart of this explosive line-up 💥

My 🎯? To cram in as many 👾-related puns as possible