Overlooked Brain Connections Hold Clues to Cognition and Mental Health - Behavioral Healthcare Network One goal of human neuroimaging is to illuminate the brain mechanisms that drive cognition and mental health. But the complexity of brain connectivity makes

Overlooked Brain Connections Hold Clues to Cognition and Mental Health

www.bhnet.org/48836/overlooked-brain-c...

One goal of human neuroimaging is to illuminate the brain mechanisms that drive cognition and mental health. But the …

Explicitly nonlinear fMRI networks reveal hidden trajectories of infant brain development www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...

Acetylcholine demixes heterogeneous dopamine signals for learning and moving - Nature Neuroscience Jang et al. measured dopamine and acetylcholine release in the striatum of rats performing a decision-making task and found that the relative timing of cholinergic and dopamine release gates whether dopamine promotes reinforcement learning or movement vigor.

The findings of a study in Nature Neuroscience suggest that cholinergic dynamics determine whether dopamine promotes vigor or learning, depending on the instantaneous behavioral context. #Neuroskyence 🧪

Low-intensity focused ultrasound to human amygdala reveals a causal role in ambiguous emotion processing and alters local and network activity The amygdala shows abnormal metabolism in depression, a disorder marked by altered emotion, motivation, and learning. Yet its causal role in these pro…

This tFUS study by @mkflugge.bsky.social is an excellent, careful, and sober mechanistic dissection contrasting the effects tFUS to amygdala vs insula.

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

Graphical abstract showing that NMDAR immunisation drives psychosis-like behaviour in mice, while clozapine reverses this. Upper panel: arrows show NMDAR immunisation producing a mouse exhibiting psychosis-like behaviour, with clozapine reversing this effect. Lower panels: anti-NMDAR antibodies bind neuronal NMDA receptors, which are then eliminated by microglia via phagocytosis, leading to psychosis. Clozapine restores NMDA receptor levels by reducing anti-NMDAR antibody levels, consistent with an immunomodulatory mechanism of action.

🥁🎉The Psychosis Collective proudly presents our first preprint

𝐂𝐥𝐨𝐳𝐚𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐮𝐭𝐨𝐢𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐝𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐬𝐲𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐬-𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐢𝐧 𝐦𝐢𝐜𝐞

𝘈 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘤𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘫𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘦𝘺 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘦𝘦 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘴

starring Le He & Harriet Feldman

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We wanted to understand how antipsychotics work. Thread🧵

The exposome and attention-related brain networks jointly predict attention problems in early adolescence Background: Attention problems are common transdiagnostic symptoms of psychiatric illness. Although environmental exposures and experiences influence attention during adolescent development, the under...

New preprint out! We show that the exposome and attention-related brain networks jointly predict attention problems in early adolescence—highlighting how environment and brain function have shared and unique associations with reported attention problems. medrxiv.org/cgi/content/...

@jhennig.bsky.social has shown that dopamine exerts a real-time effect on conditioned responding, beyond its role in learning:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Another indication that dopamine is more than a learning signal!

A joint effort with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social and @mhburrell.bsky.social.

I am excited to share some new results investigating how subcortical signals are channeled via VM to engage specific inhibitory networks in L1 of mPFC. Check out our preprint linked below if you’re interested in reading more! 🥳

Very happy part of my doctoral work is now published at #JNeurosci @sfnjournals.bsky.social We examine how subcortical signals are routed through higher order thalamus to impact local cortical circuits! Check it out at the link below 🎉

Do you censor high motion frames in fMRI? In two preprints by @twktan.bsky.social @mandymejia.bsky.social, we find that we may be censoring too much!

doi.org/10.64898/202...
arxiv.org/html/2603.07...

Strict censoring leads to worse personalized TMS targets than no censoring, even with high motion!

What are the downstream implications of censoring high motion volumes in fMRI? Two new preprints find that aggressive censoring leads to noisier FC, more attenuated and variable BWAS, and worse personalized TMS targets.

arxiv.org/html/2603.07...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Acetylcholine demixes heterogeneous dopamine signals for learning and moving Nature Neuroscience - Jang et al. measured dopamine and acetylcholine release in the striatum of rats performing a decision-making task and found that the relative timing of cholinergic and...

Thrilled to share our new paper, which shows that the relative timing of cholinergic and dopamine release dynamically gates whether dopamine acts as an RPE for in vivo plasticity and reinforcement learning. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We put out this preprint a couple months ago, but I really wanted to replicate our findings before we went to publication.

At first, what we found was very confusing!

But when we dug in, it revealed a fascinating neural strategy for how we switch between tasks

doi.org/10.1101/2024.09.29.615736

🧵

Brain Structure and Substance Use: Disentangling Risk, Exposure, and Drug-Specific Effects Importance: Polysubstance use is common, but substance use associations with neuroimaging measures have largely been investigated within individual drug types. Whether effects are substance-specific o...

The first preprint from the lab is up! Are structural MRI correlates of substance use shared across substances, or are there unique associations? And do these reflect predispositional risk and/or possibly the effects of substance exposure? www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6... #neuroskyence

I’m excited to share my newest work with @benhayden.bsky.social, and the work I’m most proud of to date, on characterizing semantic coding in single-neuron hippocampal activity in patients with autism during natural language comprehension!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Our paper on double decisions in working memory tasks is now published in Computational Brain and Behaviour!

When you give people a second chance, it reveals a lot about the contents of their memory.

Led by @paulmgarrett.bsky.social
@psychunimelb.bsky.social

rdcu.be/e8SLX

Cortical regulation of collective social dynamics during environmental challenge - Nature Neuroscience Raam, Li, Gu and colleagues identify neural mechanisms underlying group huddling in mice during cold exposure. They find that the prefrontal cortex encodes decisions to huddle and that silencing neura...

Excited to share my postdoc work is out in @natneuro.nature.com today!

We examined how the brain enables social groups to collectively coordinate their behavior in the face of environmental challenge ❄️🐭🐭🐭🐭❄️ :

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

Working hypothesis: If you're doing research and don't occasionally have a small existential crisis, either you've been blessed to work in an exceptional field (do tell which one it is!), or maybe you're being a bit naive.

Very happy that this paper from our lab is now out in @pnas.org! What happens when the *same* person experiences the *same* information with a *different* interpretation? Nearly the whole 🧠—well, at least nearly all association cortex—changes how it represents that information! tinyurl.com/p8chj2j7

Selective DBS-induced deactivations in the SCAN, building on our recent @nature.com paper.

Thrilled to announce our new paper in @natneuro.nature.com!
We managed the impossible: precision functional mapping during #DBS, with 11.7h fMRI/patient.
Selective DBS-induced deactivations in the SCAN, building on our recent @nature.com paper.
nature.com/articles/s41...
@ndosenbach.bsky.social

So maybe rest isn’t a privileged window into intrinsic organization after all.

Functional architecture may be revealed most clearly when the brain is actively engaged.

Preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202...

Curious to hear what people think!

8/8

🧠 Resting-state fMRI is often treated as the gold standard for studying the brain’s intrinsic organization.

But is it actually the best way to estimate functional architecture?

We tested this directly.

🧵1/8

A cognitive map for value-guided choice in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex Value-based decision-making can be conceptualized as navigation within a cognitive map of choice values. During choice, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) compositionally builds cognitive maps...

1/n

With Cosyne around the corner, I thought I would:

a) make a thread about our “A cognitive map for value-guided choice in the vmPFC” Cell paper (i'm a bit late). shorturl.at/DBA3H

Affective Forecasting Accuracy in Everyday Life - Affective Science Affective Science - People often predict how they might feel in the future, with varying degrees of accuracy. Such affective forecasts can centre around periods of time (e.g., tomorrow, next week)...

In work recently out in Affective Science we investigated how accurately people can forecast their emotions in everyday life. Study 1 focused on forecasts for specific time periods (tomorrow, next week). Study 2 focused on forecasts for daily unpleasant events. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Happy to share our new study about how cortical and thalamic inputs engage cholinergic interneurons in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) core, all done by my graduate student Emily Jang:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Reviewer notes: In a randomized experiment, the pre-post differences are not effect estimates Reviewer notes are a new short format with brief explanations of basic ideas that might come in handy during (for example) the peer-review process. They are a great way to keep Julia from writing 10,0...

P.S. Pre-post differences are *not* valid treatment effect estimates. Why? Here's a post by @statsepi.bsky.social: statsepi.substack.com/p/one-simple..., here's a post by me: www.the100.ci/2025/01/22/r... >

Find someone who believes in you like researchers believe in pre-post differences as valid treatment effect estimates.

Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering The visual cortex receives a stream of high-dimensional sensory input. The role of dense local, recurrent cortical connections in shaping responses to these inputs has been unclear. Here, we show that...

Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering
www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...
#neuroscience

#RewardSignals

The association between cannabis use and brain reward anticipation: a 12-month longitudinal study of adults and adolescents who use cannabis and age-matched controls - Neuropsychopharmacology Neuropsychopharmacology - The association between cannabis use and brain reward anticipation: a 12-month longitudinal study of adults and adolescents who use cannabis and age-matched controls

🚨🚨New paper day!🚨🚨
Wonderful work from the longitudinal arm of our cannabis-users study showing how brain reward-system function changes over 12 months in regular users. 🧵⬇️ #neuroskyence
www.nature.com/articles/s41...