🚨 PhD/Postdoc alert 👇

If you are interested in doing a PhD/Postdoc in computational psychiatry (starting Sept 2026), do get in touch by October 4th at ondrej.zika@pm.me :)

Any inquiries are welcome. To apply, please attach your CV, half page motivation and half page research statements.

Congrats!! It is a very cool study!! Thanks again for letting me experience it!🤗

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Looking for a PhD next year? Want to come and work on the next generation of OPM-MEG/EEG biomarkers in computational psychiatry?

Apply for our MRC iCase studentship with @mkflugge.bsky.social, collabs with @lilweb.bsky.social + industrial placement at P1Vital:
www.medsci.ox.ac.uk/study/gradua...

hahaha, great choices of alternative countries (high representational similarities) in here.

Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making - Nature Brain-wide recordings in mice reveal that prior expectations are distributed through recurrent loops across all levels of cortical and subcortical processing.

Not that it comes as much of a surprise to many of us, but it's worth emphasizing once again - the 👏 brain 👏 uses 👏 distributed 👏 coding 👏. 😁

Two new papers from the #IBL looking at brain-wide activity:

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

#neuroscience 🧪

Ultrasound system for precise neuromodulation of human deep brain circuits - Nature Communications Modulating deep brain structure can lead to therapies for neurological conditions. Here, the authors show a transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS) system featuring a 256-element helmet-shaped trans...

Paper alert: our study using a novel ultrasound stimulation device to precisely target deep brain nuclei is out in Nature Communications @ndcnoxford.bsky.social @oxcin.bsky.social @mrcbndu.ox.ac.uk @ox.ac.uk @ucl.ac.uk www.nature.com/articles/s41...

✨ I’m so excited and grateful to have been awarded an #ERC Starting Grant! 🧠✨

The project aims to investigate how the brain builds and uses cognitive maps to guide behaviour, how emotions shape these computations, and what this all means for mental health 🧠

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...

Extraordinary resource! "Comprehensive recordings from 621,733 neurons in 297 brain areas of 139 mice (12 labs) performing a decision-making task with sensory, motor & cognitive components: a public dataset to understand how computations distributed across & within brain areas drive behaviour."👇🧪

New paper our in @pnas.org, lead by @isabellehoxha.bsky.social with Léo Sperber. We use evolutionary simulation to assess and compare the adaptive value of positivity bias and gradual perseveration in reinforcement learning. Follow the thread below (and Isabelle!) for more details!

New at the university: Prof. Weber! Osnabrück University welcomes Prof. Dr. Lilian Weber! Since August 15, she has held the professorship "Cognitive Modeling" at the School of Human Sciences. A warm welcome!

In other news, I am now a ✨ COXI ✨ (cognitive scientist in Osnabrück, Germany)

www.uni-osnabrueck.de/en/campus-li...

I'll be looking for PhD students & postdocs later this year, so watch this space if combining cognitive modelling, EEG & tFUS to study flexible cognition sounds exciting to you 🚀

On the left is a rabbit. On the right is an elephant. But guess what: They’re the *same image*, rotated 90°!

In @currentbiology.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show how these images—known as “visual anagrams”—can help solve a longstanding problem in cognitive science. bit.ly/45BVnCZ

Tonic dopamine and biases in value learning linked through a biologically inspired reinforcement learning model Nature Communications - Accurate future predictions are essential for guiding behavior, and disruptions in this process are associated with psychiatric disorders. Here the authors show that changes...

My first paper with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social is finally out in @natcomms.nature.com ! rdcu.be/eACGf

TL;DR: asymmetric learning rates can be induced by shifts in tonic dopamine giving rise to pessimistic/optimistic biases in agents or animals undergoing reinforcement learning .

A landmark volume, The Handbook of Dopamine, is now online:
www.sciencedirect.com/handbook/han...

Big kudos to the editors, Stephanie Cragg and Mark Walton, for putting this together.

Our new paper is out! When navigating through an environment, how do we combine our general sense of direction with known landmark states? To explore this, @denislan.bsky.social used a task that allowed subjects (or neural networks) to choose either their next action or next state at each step.

Eye puffs prompt separable sensory, affective brain responses in mice, people Post-puff brain state might not be an emotion, some researchers caution, but the protocol provides a cross-species approach to study emotions.

A cross-species study captured an emotional brain state characterized by lingering brain activity in higher-order areas. “It’s one of those moments where you’re getting a first glimpse at a vast and complex landscape,” says @deisseroth.bsky.social.

By @callimcflurry.bsky.social

bit.ly/3U33raF

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

We @smfleming.bsky.social, Marion Rouault and @seowxft.bsky.social and I) have posted a reply osf.io/preprints/ps... to a preprint that recently raised concerns about the validity of associations between mental health and metacognition from online studies. I hope you can take the time to read it.

N2 sleep promotes the occurrence of ‘aha’ moments in a perceptual insight task Sleep supports memory consolidation, but can it also facilitate memory reorganization? This study reveals that N2 sleep, but not N1 sleep during a nap, increases the likelihood of having an 'aha' mome...

Excited to share our latest work spearheaded by @anikaloewe.bsky.social & @maritpetzka.bsky.social. 20 min naps increased the chance to solve an insight task if sleep reached N2 stage; but the EEG spectral slope was the best predictor of insight dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...
#compneuro #psychscisky

Event structure sculpts neural population dynamics in the lateral entorhinal cortex Our experience of the world is a continuous stream of events that must be segmented and organized at multiple timescales. The neural mechanisms underlying this process remain unknown. In this work, we...

Your brain doesn’t just passively track time ⏳ - it structures it.
In @Science.org we show that activity in 🧠 memory circuits (LEC) drifts constantly, but makes sharp jumps at key moments, segmenting life into meaningful events. (1/2)

👉 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I'm so excited to help bring this Computational Neuroscience workshop to life! Join a fantastic group of researchers in Denmark this August (11-14).
We've designed it for PhDs & postdocs to connect with experts and build new skills. Hope to see you there! Please do share with your colleagues!

Are you sure that your Heartbeat Evoked Potential (HEP) effect is real?
In our new paper, we show that task-evoked activity can overlap with HEPs, creating false positive effects - unless you correct for it.

Although I totally think this is very true, I feel very sad about it. 🫠

Sex‐Specific Adaptations to VTA Circuits Following Subchronic Stress Subchronic variable stress, a paradigm shown to have divergent behavioral effects in males and females, induces shared and distinct physiological adaptations in the VTA. While both males and females ...

New work from my lab looking at how dopamine neurons are affected by stress and males and females! This paper comes to you through three rounds of major building construction, a pandemic, six months that we could not get TTX, some animal facility shenanigans and now is here on your internet!

Multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain - Nature Individual dopaminergic neurons encode future rewards over distinct temporal horizons.

Two papers out today on RL in the dopaminergic neurons of the midbrain of mice (one from McGill's new PI @paulmasset.bsky.social). Both papers demonstrate heterogeneity in discount factors!

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

🧠📈 🧪 #NeuroAI

One of my favorites as well! I compared the Chinese and English versions of book 1. The translator made very bold but great changes in the book structure, so it is clearer for foreign readers.

'Understanding disrupted motivation in Parkinson’s disease through a value-based decision-making lens'

Review article by Campbell Le Heron, Lee-Anne Morris & Sanjay Manohar

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

🚨 New preprint alert! 🚨
w/ @ranimo.bsky.social 📝 osf.io/preprints/psya…

From partisan news to algorithmically curated content, we constantly receive biased misinformation. With biased input, can our beliefs be accurate?

Turns out, biased misinformation distorts our beliefs! 👇🧵 1/13