Lisa Spiering

Looking at the program again 👀 I can't wait for this! Stoked to contribute a talk on ✨the interoceptive basis of reinforcement learning✨

🚀 Postdoc Alert! Are you passionate about social learning & cultural evolution? @dominikdeffner.bsky.social & I have a 3-year position with freedom to develop your research and work on cutting-edge multiplayer and immersive experiments. Apply by March 30! hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni... Pls share 🙏

Ultrasound gives our brain a nudge in the right direction 🧠

👀 Look to your left, look to your right!

We used #ultrasound to stimulate the brain and it changed human choice behavior within a fraction of a second. No surgery, no implants.

Link to paper ⬇️

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

Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Social Decision Neuroscience at University of Birmingham Explore an exciting academic career as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Social Decision Neuroscience. Don't miss out on other academic jobs. Click to apply and explore more opportunities.

We are recruiting! Postdoctoral research fellow at www.sdn-lab.org, studying the computational & neural basis of social decision-making. Birmingham is a fantastic & affordable place to live, with one of the youngest populations in Europe & over 600 parks. Please share!
www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQO275/p...

I went to BAMB a few years ago and learned a ton! Do consider applying if you're looking for a summer school on advanced behavioural modelling.

🎉 New paper in Nature Communications 🎉

rdcu.be/e24jT

Does our environment influence how likely we are to help others?

Applications will be opening soon for BAMB! 2026

The summer school will take place from 12 - 23 July 2026

www.bambschool.org

Now online in @biologicalpsych.bsky.social CNNI - our paper showing that reliance on habitual responding in transdiagnostic compulsivity may be underpinned by uncertainty about learned environmental structure

📃 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Huge thanks to my co-authors @jscholl.bsky.social and Matthew Rushworth, as well as Hailey Trier, Jill O'Reilly, @nilskolling.bsky.social , @mkwittmann.bsky.social , and to our reviewers and funders!

Active disambiguation guides inferring controllability and cause in social interactions - Nature Communications In social settings, people need to establish how much they contribute to shared outcomes. Here, the authors show that people strategically alter their actions to establish their level of control and i...

🌟 Overall, our study provides novel insights into the mechanistic and neural basis of how humans perceive their control in social contexts.

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

@oxexppsy.bsky.social @medsci.ox.ac.uk

🩺 Understanding how we perceive control isn't just interesting for cognitive neuroscience - it has important implications for mental health. Misestimations of control have been linked to depression, psychosis, and schizophrenia.

👥 Activity in this brain region also signals a second learning mechanism, by which individuals attribute prediction errors to themselves versus others in proportion to their perceived control.

🧠 Our fMRI results show that the supramarginal gyrus plays a crucial role in establishing controllability during social interactions.

It tracks not just active disambiguation, but also inferred controllability and the components necessary for this inference.

We formalised this intuition using computational models.
Only a Bayesian learner that recognises AD as an informative intervention can explain human behaviour.
Models that ignore AD - or misinterpret it - fail to infer controllability correctly.

Why would deliberate mistakes help?

By temporarily removing their own contribution, people can compare outcomes with vs. without their input - revealing whether results were driven by them or someone else. It’s an efficient way to uncover one’s own control in social settings.

We observed a striking behaviour: People purposefully make mistakes to gather information about their control over ambiguous joint outcomes. We refer to this behaviour as “active disambiguation” (AD).

In line with their behaviour, they also report employing AD after the task.

🎉 My PhD work has just been published in @natcomms.nature.com!

How do we learn who caused what - and how much control we had - when outcomes depend on multiple people? We studied how humans do so using a new social learning task, computational modelling and fMRI.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🧵👇

Fantastic position for a Research Lab Manager in EP - please pass this on to anyone interested and apply by Friday!

🚀 Deadline for this is this Sunday! 🏃‍♀️

Do check out this amazing opportunity to join the brilliant @lilweb.bsky.social's lab 🤩! Do apply, deadline is 4th Jan

a woman says we have to work together in front of a wentworth sign ALT: a woman says we have to work together in front of a wentworth sign

Passionate about women's mental health?

Interested in brain stimulation?

Excited by cutting edge neurotech?

Come do a PhD with me!

www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

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These posts are live now! Oxford is a great place to work. Do apply if you'd like to apply neurostimulatory techniques to understand symptoms.

my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

Empowerment Gain and Causal Model Construction: Children and adults are sensitive to controllability and variability in their causal interventions Learning about the causal structure of the world is a fundamental problem for human cognition. Causal models and especially causal learning have proved to be difficult for large pretrained models usin...

New preprint in advance of a Phil Trans paper. Outlining a theoretical argument bridging Bayesian causal learning and empowerment in reinforcement learning. And empirical data that kids do too!
arxiv.org/abs/2512.08230

Non-invasive ultrasonic neuromodulation of the human nucleus accumbens impacts reward sensitivity - Nature Communications This study shows that non-invasive ultrasound to the human nucleus accumbens can modulate deep brain activity and enhance reward-guided learning, offering a potential alternative to invasive neuromodu...

New study out today in Nature Comms: www.nature.com/articles/s41..., in which we set out to test whether ultrasound could influence the reward-related learning computations of the nucleus accumbens, building on decades of work on dopaminergic prediction error and reinforcement learning. And it did.

Check out this preprint by @simyciri.bsky.social on the role of basis functions in social decision-making across development 🚀!

📣🔥Thrilled to announce that 2026 Computational Psychiatry Conference will take place in New Haven, CT, btw July 14-16 -
www.cpconf.org

@robbrutledge.bsky.social @drrickadams.bsky.social @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social @docqhuys.bsky.social @clairegillan.bsky.social Sonia Bishop

More info to come soon!

Cognitive Maps in the Prefrontal Cortex The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is critical for our ability to rapidly and flexibly adapt our behavior in new environments based on our previous experience. Despite its importance, the neural substrates a...

1/ Excited to share that our symposium review covering cognitive mapping in the PFC just came out in the Journal of Neuroscience: www.jneurosci.org/content/45/4...

There are 3 Oxford-based post doc positions for this Wellcome Trust project that will be advertised soon!

If you have experinece in neurostimulation (tms/tus) and/or modelling of cogneuro data in humans do contact one of us (me, @mkflugge.bsky.social @lilweb.bsky.social, Jacinta OShea) to discuss!

1/4 I’m super excited to share our latest PNAS paper: a 7T-fMRI study shows that functional connectivity between habenula and VTA in humans is associated with individual differences in negative learning bias, which further associates with higher anxiety and depression scores. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

(1/3) Focused ultrasound stimulation is a versatile neuroscience tool. Depending on parameter settings it can safely and reversibly alter brain function, or it can lead to lasting tissue damage. That’s why we have safety guidelines (see ITRUSST: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... ).