Hans Kirschner

Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying the distinct motivational influences of reward and punishment on cognitive control Human motivation is fundamentally shaped by one's expectations of the reward they could earn for good performance or the punishment they would avoid for poor performance. However, the extent to which ...

Thrilled to share our new preprint highlighting distinct neurocomputational mechanisms underlying how reward and punishment determine adaptive cognitive control - a massive fMRI study and collaborative team effort with the @shenhavlab.bsky.social 🧠

Link here:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

20.10.2025 18:42 — 👍 44    🔁 18    💬 0    📌 2

This is excellent news - congrats @ondrejzika.bsky.social

24.09.2025 15:24 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

🚨 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 🙏

24.09.2025 15:18 — 👍 140    🔁 36    💬 26    📌 5

I'm happy to now be able to share a talk I gave at TEDx New England last Fall! 

The talk is about our lab's work on what makes decisions costly, and how to make them less so.

I discuss lessons for all kinds of decisions, including getting people to vote.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeHg...

08.09.2025 17:25 — 👍 41    🔁 9    💬 1    📌 1

🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans.

Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning.

28.08.2025 14:00 — 👍 130    🔁 47    💬 2    📌 6

Decoding deception with the P300: A meta-analysis of the Concealed Information Test The Concealed Information Test (CIT) is frequently used to determine the presence of crime-related information in a suspect's memory. In this paper, w…

🥳 Proud to share: @juliaknappe.bsky.social’s master’s thesis is now published. Her meta-analysis shows the P300 can help detect deception. Read: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

25.08.2025 11:48 — 👍 1    🔁 1    💬 0    📌 0

Methamphetamine-induced adaptation of learning rate dynamics depend on baseline performance In individuals with moderately low baseline performance, methamphetamine reduces the tendency to misinterpret high outcome noise.

📣 Final version of our @elife.bsky.social article is now online! We show that in individuals with moderately low baseline performance, methamphetamine reduces the tendency to misinterpret high outcome noise. 🥳

elifesciences.org/articles/101...

29.07.2025 06:13 — 👍 6    🔁 3    💬 0    📌 0

Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks - Nature Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

02.07.2025 19:03 — 👍 329    🔁 141    💬 9    📌 4

Ten principles for reliable, efficient, and adaptable coding in psychology and cognitive neuroscience - Communications Psychology Programming is essential for modern research in neuroscience and psychology, but it can quickly become a source of frustration and error. This Primer introduces ten practical principles guiding resear...

Proud to announce our primer on "Ten principles for reliable, efficient, and adaptable coding in psychology and cognitive neuroscience"

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

This primer is for beginners to get started, advanced programmers to improve, and PIs.

#psychology #psychsci #cogsci #neuroskyence

15.04.2025 12:41 — 👍 111    🔁 57    💬 2    📌 5

one of the most intriguing projects i've been involved in: automated scientific discovery in an area (human/animal RL) I've been working on forever. can an LLM do the job of my grad students? if it is backed up by super smart scientists incl @pcastr.bsky.social @neurokim.bsky.social & kevin miller

10.02.2025 13:50 — 👍 34    🔁 11    💬 3    📌 1

Excited to see this work by brilliant @alexweuthen.bsky.social published at @commspsychol.bsky.social - first of a series of cool stuff arising from his phd project - stay tuned :)

07.02.2025 08:28 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Error-driven upregulation of memory representations - Communications Psychology Using single-trial analysis in fMRI, this study shows that activity in brain areas associated with error monitoring and cognitive control differentiates between items that are later remembered correct...

With single-trial analysis, this fMRI study shows that activity in brain areas associated with error monitoring & cognitive control differentiates between items remembered correctly vs those where mistakes persist.
@alexweuthen.bsky.social @hanskirschner.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

31.01.2025 13:36 — 👍 3    🔁 2    💬 0    📌 0

Hidden state inference requires abstract contextual representations in the ventral hippocampus The ability to use subjective, latent contextual representations to influence decision-making is crucial for everyday life. The hippocampus is hypothesized to bind together otherwise abstract combinat...

Huge congrats to @karyna-mi.bsky.social for her paper published today in Science! She found that the hippocampus is really important for a key strategy we use to make decisions called hidden state inference! 🧪 🧠https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq5874 1/7

22.11.2024 13:20 — 👍 596    🔁 116    💬 31    📌 16

Headshot pictures of nine invited speakers to RLDM. Photos are of Iain Couzin, Valentin Wyart, Marie Monfils, Nicolas Tritsch, Wei Ji Ma, Cate Hartley, Michael Littman, Doina Precup, and Amanda Prorok.

Headshot pictures of six invited speakers to RLDM. Photos are of Andreas Krause, Karl Tuyls, Tim Rocktaeschel, Weinan Zhang, Alison Adcock, and Sanne de Wit.

🤖 Meet Our Incredible Speakers! 🧠
We’re thrilled to announce the invited speakers for RLDM 2025:
✨ Iain Couzin
✨ Andreas Krause
✨ Alison Adcock
... and many more (see pictures)!
📅 Don’t miss their insights on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making
🎟️ Register now: rldm.org/call-for-abs...

20.11.2024 10:24 — 👍 23    🔁 7    💬 1    📌 1

Computational Psychiatry Conference University of Minnesota (July 16-18, 2024)

Join us for the Computational Psychiatry Conference cpconf.org July 14-16 2025 in beautiful Tübingen, Germany. Proposals for symposia can now be submitted. Each symposium should have 4 speakers, and we are looking for symposia across the range from basic to clinical and big data.

13.11.2024 10:35 — 👍 63    🔁 38    💬 2    📌 3

Orthogonal neural encoding of targets and distractors supports multivariate cognitive control
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroscience

11.03.2024 20:05 — 👍 8    🔁 2    💬 0    📌 0